Oakmark’s Bill Nygren: Easier Today to Be a Value Investor Than When I Started

June 14, 2013 Leave a comment

June 12, 2013, 7:13 P.M. ET

Nygren: Easier Today to Be a Value Investor Than When I Started

By Brendan Conway

Bill Nygren, manager of Oakmark Fund (OAKMX), isn’t having the line that active fund managers are hampered by the last few years’ market volatility, high-speed trading or other modern boogeymen. Asked by an audience member at the Morningstar Investment Conference whether it’s more difficult to be a fund manager today than in the past — a theme in the conference’s opening panel — Nygren argued it’s actually easier. The junior analysts his company hires are “definitely” smarter than recruits were when he started out. But that’s not the defining factor, he explained. “One of the things that has changed is the time horizon of investors,” Nygren said. “Investors might be smarter than 20 or 30 years ago, but they are focused on such a different time period than what we are looking for. I’ve seen sell-side reports [where they argue,] ‘It might take more than two quarters for the good news to start coming out.’” He chuckles. “[Ours is] 5 to 7 years. [So] there’s actually less competition for cheap stocks today than when I started in the business,” he said. “Indexing, the percentage of momentum investors, very short term events — I think is higher than ever. [It] makes it easier for a long-term value investor to do well.”

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Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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