Where to find value

Anyone who tells you there is nothing cheap to buy out there is clearly just looking in the wrong place, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

When we invest, we all like to think we are getting a good deal on the fund or stock we are buying. If we didn't, why would we do it? Look at things in simple terms like that and you could say that, while investment managers claim to use one style or another (usually "value" or "growth"), they are pretty much all effectively value investors.

But it is actually a tad more complicated. A real value investor buys something because it is cheap in absolute terms it trades at less than the value of its physical assets; it is on a price/earnings ratio of less than eight (or so); it has a sustainable dividend yield, several percentage points higher than the market average that sort of thing.

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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.