Thomas Russo describes the important ingredients of his tax-efficient, long-term buy-and-hold approach to “global value” equity investments. He touches upon the two aspects most important to his investments:
1. Reduction of Agency Costs
2. The “Capacity to Reinvest”
Mr. Russo’s presentation, in addition, focuses on factors which form a sort of checklist which Mr. Russo observes when attempting to reduce risks in his search for global returns.
Mr. Russo addresses a handful of investments which failed to deliver expected returns, believing that as Mr. Buffett is prone to say that ‘good decisions come from good judgment, and good judgment comes from bad decisions'.
Finally, Mr. Russo shares some personal reflections from his professional lifetime of “global value” equity investments. Such references cluster around the “Big Cs”:
1. Compound Interest
2. Character
3. Culture
4. Capacity to do Nothing
About the speaker:
Thomas Russo was born in 1955 and grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania, a small town best known as the birthplace of the oil industry. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in history in 1977 and from Stanford University with degrees in law and business in 1984. He then joined Ruane, Cuniff & Goldfarb, where he worked on the firm’s flagship Sequoia Fund. In 1989, he joined Gardner Investments (now Gardner Russo and Gardner), a Pennsylvania-based firm catering mostly to high-net-worth individuals, where he manages the Semper Vic investment partnership.