Your great advantage over fund managers

Fund managers love to talk up the benefits of value investing. But the trouble is, says Merryn Somerset Webb, they so rarely practise what they preach.

I meet a lot of fund managers. I tend to like them. Fund managers are mostly charming company; they are, on the whole, clever, interesting and full of sensible-sounding ideas; and if you see them at a conference, they often have something nice you can take home for your kids.

I've written before about how all these nice men purport to be into value investing (buying cheap stuff) or at least quality value investing (buying good stuff at fair prices) at the moment. They tend to tell me they are running their fund just as Warren Buffett used to run his before it got way too big. They have strict valuation criteria they aren't going to deviate from. They defy consensus, shut their ears to short-term noise and focus on the long term.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.