Time for a guilty secret: I started buying shares this week. My colleague Merryn Somerset Webb might think that the markets are still going to hell in a handcart and I don’t disagree with her on a macro level – I think we’ll be testing 4000 for the FTSE, bank rescue or not!
But, in some sectors and in some investment spaces, value is abundant – with a huge margin of safety – and getting more abundant by the day. As analyst Seth Klarman pointed out in a preface to a new edition of Ben Graham’s classic text Security Analysis, value investors “don’t need the entire market to be bargain priced, just 20 or 25 unrelated securities”.
