SumZero Investor Profile Anthology

Over the last year, SumZero has published profiles of several of our more prominent members. For the the first time, we are publishing an anthology of these investor profiles. This PDF contains interviews from legends in the investment management industry, including Aswath Damodaran, Mohnish Pabrai, Chuck Royce, Michael Mauboussin, and many more.

Our investor profiles are designed to showcase the best that the SumZero Buyside community has to offer, and we would strongly encourage any investment professionals interested in membership to apply to the site.

Access to the Investor Profile Anthology is available via the link below and on the sidebar.

Selections from these interviews are below:

“The most egregious valuation mistake that I see investment professionals make is mistaking pricing for valuation. Most investment professionals don’t do valuation, they do pricing. What I mean by that is that you price a number to a stock based on what other people are paying for similar stocks. Any time you use a multiple comparable you’re not valuing the company, you’re pricing a company.”

Aswath Damodaran - NYU Stern

“I am a SumZero member. And as part of my research when I look at a company, I will usually go on and do a search to see if someone’s written up a report on it. SumZero is a great platform because it encourages the community sharing of investment research. Beyond that, I don’t use a lot of online tools. I mostly rely on public disclosures that have been made by companies, and I take it from there, and run from there.”

Mohnish Pabrai - The Pabrai Funds

“I think the inadequacies of GAAP accounting create opportunities. For example, we own a tiny software company, SharpSpring. For every dollar they spend on marketing, they generate seven dollars of lifetime value. As long as the marketing spend is that productive, they should be spending every dollar they can find on marketing. Profits should be zero, or less than zero.”

Scott Miller - Greenhaven Road Capital

“One aspect of the systematic/discretionary discussion I find fascinating is time horizon. My take is that short-term price predictions are already largely the domain of systematic strategies. But few systematic models have anything to say about 3-5 year outcomes. The first-, second-, and third-order effects of a disruptive innovation are hard for a human to assess, but probably even harder for an algorithm.”

Michael Mauboussin - BlueMountain Capital Management

https://sumzero.com/sp/SZInvestorAnthology