安东民·波顿是我非常喜欢的一位投资大师，最近出了一本新书，值得花时间读一下。英国投资家(Interactive Investor)的主编对此书的评价也很高。

If the first half of this blog post demonstrates I’m not trained to read annual reports, it’s an attribute I share with Anthony Bolton. We have a similar stock picking processes too, so it’s hardly surprising that, now I’ve finished his book, I liked it.

More surprising perhaps, is that I’ve added it to my shelf of favourite books. This is a rare event as there’s limited space on that shelf, and, painfully, an old favourite must make way.

Bolton invests against the tide. His favourite shares are small companies turning around their fortunes. So, you’ll understand why I opened this book for sustenance. The names of the investors that inspired him are scattered throughout this blog: Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Bill Miller, John Maynard Keynes, Nassim Taleb, John Templeton, and Peter Lynch, for example.

He parts company with Peter Lynch, his US contemporary at Fidelity, though, on growth versus value. Lynch was an early pioneer of the PEG ratio but Bolton’s not having it:

I realise that PEG ratios are more the domain of the growth rather than the value investor but I’m afraid I can see little logic in the argument that a business at five times earnings growth at 5% a year, one at ten times earnings growing at 10% or one at 20 times earnings growing at 20%, which all have the same PEG, are equally attractive, I would go for the five times earnings growing at 5% every day.

I think the point is growth is speculation, it’s about the future and growth estimates are unreliable. Value on the other hand is much more real.

Occasionally he’s too circumspect. The chapter, ‘Information sources I use’, is comically brief. He says that if everybody’s using the same information, nobody will have an edge. Then he mentions that he’s more interested in new sources of research, like market research, that are not available to most investors. And finally, when he’s built up the reader’s expectations of a triumphant denouement he says he can’t tell us what his secret sources are or he’d have to kill us (in so many words), lest he endanger Fidelity’s competitive advantage.

No wonder he’s known, to his dismay, as ‘The Quiet Assassin’.

The rest of the book is his personal reflections on an outstanding career in investment management, and I love it. It’s practical and imbued with such common sense it seems at odds with the way the finance industry has developed and gives hope to any hard working stock picker of reasonable intelligence.

Even the introduction to the ill-fated chapter on information sources starts with words I think should be tattooed to the back of every stock picker’s hands:

In this business there is no shortage of answers - the skill is knowing whom to ask and what question to ask.