BY RICHARD GILL, CFA
read to succeed
Invest in the Best
Applying the principles of Warren Buffett for long-term investing success by Keith Ashworth-Lord There are scores of books for sale about the life, successes and investment philosophies of Warren Buffett. A quick search in the book section on amazon.co.uk for the Sage of Ohama's name brings up no less than 5,591 relevant results. From classic read The Snowball, to collections of his timeless shareholder letters, along with hundreds of investment guides, readers are spoilt for choice. So is there really room on the market for yet another Buffett based book? When its author is a top performing fund manager, and considered to be one of the foremost authorities on the investment guru, then the answer is clearly yes.
From outer-space to outperformance Invest in the Best's author, Keith Ashworth-Lord, is a man of many talents. He graduated with a degree in Astrophysics, then obtained a Masters in Management Studies before embarking on a career in the investment markets. Over 30 years he has worked in a variety of roles, winning a clutch of awards for his stock picking skills along the way. However, his current
focus is Investment Director at Sanford DeLand Asset Management, which he set up in 2010. The firm's flagship product is the Buffettology Fund, notable for being the only fund to have a licence to use the trademarked "Buffettology" name – trademark owner Mary Buffett (Warren's former daughter in law) was so impressed with Ashworth-Lord that she gave him the go ahead to use it. By applying the Business Perspective Investing methodology practised by Buffett himself, as well as Benjamin Graham, the UK focussed fund has delivered excellent returns and significantly outperformed its benchmark since launch in March 2011 (see chart below). Current holdings include small cap favourites Domino's Pizza, Dart Group and Bioventix.
Secrets of Success So how has Ashworth-Lord's fund been so successful? He puts this down to one simple reason which echoes Warren Buffett's investment philosophy: buying superior businesses at prices that make business sense. Invest in the Best focuses on applying this methodology, which is encapsulated in the previously mentioned
investment style known as Business Perspective Investing. And it is a good old fashioned investment text, interspersed with case studies, explaining in detail how the investment style works, and teaching investors how to put it into practice themselves. To give a basic explanation, Business Perspective Investing is a long-term, fundamentals based investment method which argues there is no philosophical distinction between buying shares in a company and buying the company in its entirety. As such, when analysing a company investors should dig as deep into the quality of the business as someone who was going to buy the whole thing. After a short introduction, which explains how the author came to develop his own investment philosophy, the next few chapters concentrate on applying the principles of Business Perspective Investing to screen for companies for investment consideration. The main focus in this initial analysis stage is to look for "quality businesses", or in other words those that exhibit a number of characteristics which enable them to flourish over the long term. These include a simple business model, transparent financial statements, high cash flow, superior com-
68 | ISSUE 18 – SEPTEMBER 2016 Master Investor is a registered trademark of Master Investor Limited | www.masterinvestor.co.uk