Financial Freedom SG

Amidst the turmoil of the recent market correction, I am reading a book of “Lessons from the Legends of Wall Street ” which is a good primer of the different market gurus that most investors can learn from.

Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Phil Fisher, T.Rowe Price and John Templeton.

Who better than these people? Not many others, some like George Soros, John Bogle, Peter Lynch would be two that comes into mind.

There would be others who are hidden and not as famous as some of those mentioned because these up there have the longevity across market ups and downs to prove their methodology works.

For the list of people up there, i was familiar with all bar T. Rowe Price. It seems that he was a visionary who identified trends ahead of time and invested in growth companies, small companies, and also commodities companies.

The alpha is Benjamin Graham whose value investing and security analysis forms the basis from which the other investors extraordinaire built their investing careers upon.

Phil Fisher was the first person who put a methodology to analyzing a company qualitatively through investigative almost detective like work.

Warren Buffett was a pupil of Benjamin Graham, took to his ideas like fish to water and went looking for Phil Fisher when he heard about this methods and adapted Fisher’s method to his immense number crunching abilities. He married quantitative with qualitative analysis and became the most extraordinary investor of all time.

John Templeton, I am still reading about him :) But I heard about him through the Franklin Templeton funds and know that he is probably the investor who is the most diversified into different countries amongst those mentioned above.

I leave you with a quote from the book about T. Rowe Price philosophy:

“Price’s philosophy was that the customer’s interest should always come first and he wanted to be in the business of only managing money and providing related services. That was Price’s original concept and that is how T. Rowe Price Associates is run. We manage accounts of individuals and institutions, mutual funds, and related businesses. Price’s principles continue  to be a very important part of our processes for investing…. Price's emphasis on the importance of fundamental research, interviewing managers, and being alert to changes in the economy, industries, and firms is something we very much adhere to today.” (page 170)

Have you read any good investment books recently?