Erik Metanomski Quotes

101 Erik Metanomski Quotes (Lanyon Asset Management, MMC Contrarian)

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Investing in the sharemarket has got to be around avoiding the train wrecks.
Erik Metanomski

The key to prospering in the sharemarket is not so much your good years but in ensuring that you do not give it all back in the bad years.
Erik Metanomski

All I draw on is pure fundamentals. It’s got to be cheap and when it reaches what I think is its fundamental value, I will sell.
Erik Metanomski

What happens in the short term isn’t fundamental. It is quotational.
Erik Metanomski

The vast majority of our learned [and conflicted] financial community continue to preach the virtues of being, at all times, fully or substantially invested and being as transactionally hyperactive as possible.
Erik Metanomski

Individual stocks are only good purchases at the right price – the price you pay will generally determine the level of future returns generated. Buy shares in a great company at an inflated price and it will most likely turn out to be a very ordinary investment.
Erik Metanomski

[On his Value Growth Trust at MMC Asset Management producing returns of approximately 25% compound per annum during 1993-2005 compared to 12.9% for the overall stock market.] Those returns were achieved by a strict adherence to the deep-value approach.
Erik Metanomski

[In February 2012 on setting up Lanyon Asset Management] David Prescott approached me after studying my record and investment philosophies at MMC as he was looking to build a boutique deep-value fund management business, which is how Lanyon started.
Erik Metanomski

[In July 2013] International value investors we follow closely include
Seth Klarman, Joel Greenblatt and Howard Marks. Locally [In Australia], we respect David Paradice who has delivered consistently strong returns in Australian small caps over a long period.
Erik Metanomski

[In January 2013] We will look in a pretty non-discriminatory way at any sector or individual company that throws up a cheap and quality opportunity for purchase at any given time.
Erik Metanomski



What really struck me about the value investors is some of them didn’t even have a quote machine on their desk. They were not interested in people generally, and their phone never rang. They had annual reports piled high all around their offices and they would work in complete isolation. They would never come in in the morning and say what is the market going to do today and how do we feel about the economy. They just spent all of their time analysing companies.
Erik Metanomski

If you calculate that the downside is very, very significant or equal to your upside, you just don’t buy it. They key is saying no.
Erik Metanomski

I think most successful people in this industry learn to say no probably 99 out of 100 times to ideas that hit their desk.
Erik Metanomski

I think that one of the greatest things about this business is that there is not a day that you don’t come in and learn something. That will never stop.
Erik Metanomski

If you haven’t got a very good reason for holding something, you should not be holding it.
Erik Metanomski

The way to make money and keep it in any environment is to first and foremost be obsessive about preserving what you already have.
Erik Metanomski

If you can’t purchase an asset at a fair or discounted price, it is better to hold cash regardless of it’s yield.
Erik Metanomski

Money tends to be freely and increasingly available to chase assets as they become more and more expensive but very tough to come by when opportunities are more abundant as prices fall.
Erik Metanomski

My father to the day he died, was horrified about what went on and the amount of money people would put into stocks. Like a lot of people who don’t understand the market, he thought it was just a casino. He used to say to me, ‘Can’t you do something useful with your life, for goodness sake, rather than going and buying silly things everyday?’ He had a pretty jaundiced view… Until the day he died, he never let me buy a stock for him.
Erik Metanomski

You need to know what you’re investing in.
Erik Metanomski



What really amazes me about markets is that the vast majority of people in markets do not ever learn from their mistakes.
Erik Metanomski

They will read all the Warren Buffett books ever written and say it’s absolutely logical and the way to invest but one in 10,000 will actually have the discipline to follow it through.
Erik Metanomski

People treat it like a casino. That is why so few individuals make money in sharemarkets.
Erik Metanomski

Booms lead to busts and when the busts are at their worst, that is when most people are taking their funds out. They won’t return until the end of the next boom to be slaughtered again.
Erik Metanomski

Stockbrokers and, unfortunately, quite a few fund managers… They are not driven by what they should have learnt or the fundamentals. They are driven by pressure to come up with a hot stock every day or to be doing something transactionally every day.
Erik Metanomski

Your first mentor is your most important because you really build a base for the way you are going to invest in the long term…
Erik Metanomski

[On one of his first mentors] He taught me the phones did not have to ring. He taught me the importance of doing your own work. He emphasised that this is real money you are dealing with. He was incredibly patient… Every time I lost money, he treated it as a lesson. He didn’t jump on me. He just asked me what I had learnt. Gradually it started to sink it.
Erik Metanomski

This whole game is nothing but a probability game. It’s all about probability. There is no sure thing. Everything has a risk-return trade-off.
Erik Metanomski

It took me a long time and a lot of pain to realise that there is no easy way.
Erik Metanomski

You know the old saying: If it rains long enough, the pond raises all the ducks.
Erik Metanomski



1987 taught me that you have to understand what you owned and drown out market hype completely. Always do you own work. Don’t rely on other people, even if it is the easy way out.
Erik Metanomski

Some of the most successful fund managers said the annual report would tell them far more about a company than management ever could.
Erik Metanomski

There is such huge pressure put on fund managers to perform in the short term that it leads them to do things that, either consciously or unconsciously, they know are wrong and they know will blow them up at some point in time. If you are going to be assessed on three, six or even 12 month performance, you are going to do these things. It’s dangerous. It’s incredibly dangerous.
Erik Metanomski

I buy based on what I think is a fair value for the business.
Erik Metanomski

Crystal ball gazing is a very dangerous art. It is speculating.
Erik Metanomski

If you are going to be led by the market, you are going to make some very serious mistakes… You are going to become like 99 percent of investors who are dictated by what prices are doing as opposed to the fundamentals.
Erik Metanomski

If you have done your work thoroughly, believe in the fundamentals, what you are buying is cheap and the probabilities are stacked in your favour, you’ve just got to hang in there.
Erik Metanomski

The people who were sipping champagne, incredibly bullish at the market top and were saying the market is the only place to be were the same people who were later selling their houses and saying that shares were going to go down for the next 25 years and you shouldn’t be in the markets…
Erik Metanomski

I learnt there is unlimited downside when you short. I learnt the hard way…
Erik Metanomski

When you are long a stock your maximum downside is zero.
Erik Metanomski



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