16 July 2012
Renown US investor Barton Biggs passed away on Saturday 14 July after a short illness. Like the late Walter Schloss, Mr Biggs was another investment professional who followed in the footsteps of Benjamin Graham and the school of value investing. As noted in the LA Times:
“Biggs co-founded one of the first hedge funds, Fairfield Partners, in 1965. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1973 and founded Morgan Stanley Investment Management in 1975. He served on the bank’s board until 1996.
Biggs retired from Morgan Stanley in 2003 and formed another hedge fund, Traxis Partners.
In 1997, during a long bull market for stocks, Biggs said: “Deep in the American psyche, along with motherhood, apple pie and the flag, is the belief that stocks are fabulous investments and that if you hold them long enough you can’t lose.”
He warned, though, that stocks in most parts of the world were already “very expensive.”
In a speech in Tokyo on Jan. 21, 1999, Biggs predicted that a spectacular rally in Internet stocks would “come to a very bad end.” The warning was blamed for pushing the Dow Jones industrial average down 71 points that day.”
Barton Biggs was a know proponent of value investing, having been introduced to the teachings on Benjamin Graham early on in his career. This quote from the Wall Street Journal is notable:
“His father was an economist and executive at the Bank of New York. In an interview earlier this year with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Biggs recalled that his father refused to discuss investing with him until he had read Benjamin Graham’s and David Dodd’s classic “Security Analysis.”
“When I’d read it he told me to read it again and underline it and only then would he talk with me,” Mr. Biggs said. “He was trying to inculcate in me the philosophy of value investing.”
Whites IFM is a long time adherent to the principles of value investing. It is a methodology that has stood the test of time and has produced many of the so called “investment gurus” of our times – Warren Buffett, Walter Schloss and Barton Biggs to name but a few.
We recommend you read the full Wall Street Journal obituary for Barton Biggs.