Can Turtles Fly?

Thanks to GuruFocus for bringing this Bloomberg interview with Jean-Marie Eveillard to my attention. It deals with Japan, which I'm sure is of high interest to contrarians and deep value investors. Japan, for those living in the cave for a few decades ;), has been in a 20-year bear market. That alone should warrant a look from contrarians. It is rare for equity markets to go into such long bear markets in the modern era. Nothing new in the interview but I always like to hear the thoughts of successful investors. Even if there are no new stock suggestions, I like to get a feel for their thinking. For instance, Jean-Marie mentions how he was in Japan an year ago and they seem slightly more open towards immigration. I don't want to beat the horse to death, since I have repeated these points many times, but here are some reasons to be cautious of Japan: Horrible corporate governance : Shareholders basically don't own the companies except in name (I might be exaggerating a tad ...

Here are some audio interviews with prominent investors. Some of these have been making the trip on the blogging world so you may have encountered them before. I have been listening to these over the weeks and some are worth checking out. Note that these interviews are not all current and were conducted months ago (years ago in the case of the last one mentioned.) Thanks to Controlled Greed for bringing to my attention the audio interviews at King World News . King World News has a bunch of interviews with prominent investors and strategists. King World News seems biased towards gold and seems skeptical of mainstream economics so the interview subjects are biased in that direction. You may want to check their archive to find any that may interest you. Here are a few that you may find worthwhile (in no particular order.) I would recommend the ones with an asterisk (I have not listened to John Mauldin's yet but he usually has interesting things to say.) Jim Rogers (nothing new) Ma...

First Eagle Funds recently had a conference call discussing their semi-annual update and market commentary. You can access the MP3 audio here and the transcript here . This might be Jean-Marie Eveillard's last conference call. He will still be around but he is essentially retiring so we may not see much of him anymore. Matt McLennan and Abhay Deshpande will take over as co-managers of the portfolios. It's a tall order and it remains to be seen how they perform. So far, I have to say I'm impressed with Matt McLennan, who seems to really know his stuff (here is a CNBC interview from December and Bloomberg interview from January .) But knowing your stuff is not good enough to be successful in investing so we'll see how good his, and his partner's, stockpicking will be. Here are some of my thoughts on some points discussed in the conference call: On Japan John Arnhold: Jean-Marie, world equity markets seem to have become quite correlated. You have increased your expo...

CNBC conducted an interview with value investors Martin Whitman, Jean-Marie Eveillard, and Charles Royce. Check it out... Segment 1 Segment 2 Segment 3

I have only been following Jean-Marie Eveillard for a few years but, boy, does he seem bearish . Nothing really new in this article but let me pick off some of his thoughts. Fed policies under Greenspan, Eveillard says, precipitated "one bubble after another" -- from the implosion of technology stocks in the late 1990s to the recent real-estate price collapse and the related financial-services industry meltdown. "In the last two or three years, the financial acrobatics were extraordinary," Eveillard said. "You could get a mortgage without having to document your income, your assets, or whether you had a job. Why do gold bulls always take a dim view of the Federal Reserve (not that Jean-Marie is necessarily one)? Or is that a pre-condition for being accepted into the fraternity of the brotherhood of the elite exclusive group for the shiny yellow element of Aurum? ;) I personally am not as critical of central banks as many others. I think Alan Greenspan is overra...

Random articles I find interesting for the week ending June 7 2008... (Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi for The Economist ) I can't stop cracking up at that image. Maybe something is wrong with me but I find it humourous. The only thing is, if the pigs in suits are the investment bankers and their associates, who is the wolf? The government? Short-sellers? Investors? The public? Free-market forces? End of the Free-wheeling Wall Street Ways? (The Economist) Iceland: Living Beyond One's Means Starts to Bite Back (The Globe & Mail) Discussion with Warren Buffett (March 2008 discussion at the Richard Ivey School of Business (Canada)) Roundtable with Jean-Marie Eveillard (Wealthtrack with Consuelco Mack) Fortune's 35 Largest Private Companies (Fortune) Oil Badguy Conspiracy Theories and Arguments Against It (Fortune) Why Oil Will Fall --But When? (on an opposite note, if you are interested in commodities or are bullish on them, you might also check out this video in...

Here are some items that I find interesting, along with some thoughts running through my head: Jean-Marie Eveillard First Eagle Conference Call The Economist article on the financial crisis: Paradise Lost Would you average down into this stock? Junk bonds vs Stocks - still trying to figure out when junk bonds are better Jean-Marie Eveillard Conference Call Thanks to Fat Pitch Financials for referring me to the First Eagle conference call for their mutual fund owners (audio link on their site doesn't seem to work me but here is the text transcript ). I never heard of Jean-Marie Eveillard until a couple of years ago (goes to show how much of a newbie I am) but I have started to like him a lot more than other commonly referenced superinvestors. He is a value investor with a different perspective on many things. He also tends to be more international than many others. I recommend reading the conference call transcript if you are a newbie to investing, if you want some international i...

Here is a Bloomberg interview with Jean-Marie Eveillard. The interview is not too insightful except for some of his stock picks so you can skip this one if you wish. As is generally the case, when commentators say they like a stock, you need to be careful with price. It's often not clear if the commentator likes the stock at the current price or if they just like the company in general. Some quick notes: Visa/MasterCard vs American Express: He says that the business models of Visa and Mastercard are more uncertain than Amex. I disagree with that. Yes, Amex is more diversified in having a credit card issuing operation (whereas Visa and MC generally just process transactions). But Visa and MC are like tollbooths in that they collect a fee for every transaction. Jean-Marie Eveillard thinks that the fees may go down but I don't think that's a problem. The untapped market is so huge (CC pentration in many developing countries is low) and Visa/MC have such a large barrier to en...

Thanks to gurufocus.com for mentioning this Morningstar Advisor conversation piece between Martin Whitman and Jean-Marie Eveilla rd. For those not familiar, they are highly successful value investors who run the Third Avenue Value Fund (Whitman) and the First Eagle Fund (Eveillard). It`s an entertaining read, with a humourous Martin Whitman. Here are some things I found insightful: (MW=Martin Whitman; JME=Jean-Marie Eveillard) MW: ...We buy and hold long term. Markets go down, we take advantage. We sort of operate under the implicit assumption that if we don't know more about the situation than the market, we wouldn't be there. They operate under the assumption that the market is sending me messages; the market knows more than any individual. It's just the opposite... JME: That's right. I think it's Seth Klarman who said, "The biggest edge that value investors have is their long-term orientation," which I think jives as well with Ben Graham saying, "...

Thanks to Dah Hui Lau's blog (aka David) for the following reference to a Jean-Marie Eveillard interview in the August edition of Financial Advisor magazine. Jean-Marie Eveillard is a respected value manager who runs First Eagle Funds. It's worth reading about his thoughts on diverse topics, many of which are quite pertinent right now. I'll list some of the items I found insightful below (for some reason I can't seem to copy the text from that PDF document). He isn't so worried about the current boom except for the fact that it is a credit boom. He says credit booms end with credit busts. As is the case with most value managers, he says private equity competes with him and makes it harder to find opportunities. Warren Buffett has remarked on this quite often. Although this might be a bit biased given that he is a mutual fund manager, he says that hedge funds are basically money-making schemes for the managers. He wonders what's the difference between a hedge f...