Peter Cundill Quotes

101 Peter Cundill Quotes

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We go short on markets, not individual securities.
Peter Cundill

[On the financial community devoting too much time to predicting the stock market.] It makes me wonder what might be accomplished if all this time, energy and money were applied to endeavours with a better chance of proving reliable and practically useful.
Peter Cundill

[On the most important attribute of a successful value investor.] Patience, patience and more patience. It’s a quality that most investors do not possess.
Peter Cundill

[In 1984 on what compound rates of return value investing produces. At least] In the high teens over longer periods of time.
Peter Cundill

[In March 2005] I came to value investing in 1972 or 1973 reading chapter five of a book called ‘Supermoney.’ [Adam Smith]
Peter Cundill

[On him asking to run a fund in 1975 which had the worst track record in the country when he took it over.] I asked the board can I run it using Benjamin Graham’s ‘Net-net’ strategy. And they said ‘Well, you can’t do any worse so you might as well give it a try.’
Peter Cundill

[In 1975] It was a wonderful time to start investing. Just as the economy was getting better and rates were getting stable and the various banking crises around the world were starting to get stabilized.
Peter Cundill

In 1975 there were hundreds of these ‘Net-nets’.
Peter Cundill

There were heaps of these magic sixes. The magic sixes were companies that had 6% dividend yield, 6 times earnings and 60% of book value.
Peter Cundill

I began to get into the practice of going to the worst stock exchange in the world…
Peter Cundill



[On going to the Stockholm stock market.] They said the Stockholm stock market is never going to go up again… I asked are the cheap? And they said ‘Of course they are they’re trading at three times earnings…’
Peter Cundill

[On buying banks for their industrial share portfolios and getting the actual bank for free.] You had a huge, huge, margin of safety in these banks.
Peter Cundill

Most value investors tend to buy things too early and sell things too early.
Peter Cundill

The period of the mid to late nineties and two-thousand were not kind to value investors in the most part… [On Nortel being $72 versus Brascan at $18 and no body caring.] And these things will happen yet again. They always do.
Peter Cundill

One of the dangers with ‘Net-net’ investing is if you buy a Net-net that begins to lose money, your net-net goes down and your capacity to be able to yield. [And so need some margin of safety that the company is not going to go bust.]
Peter Cundill

[On finding 55 net-nets in the 55,000 securities in the world.] Of the 55,000 securities in the world a large amount of them are not Canadian… There are tricks to be learned, but it’s not that difficult.
Peter Cundill

[On encouraging looking at overseas opportunities when markets are heated.] Maybe there were too many analysts covering the marketplace when just taken in just the American context.
Peter Cundill

One of the other areas of opportunities to value investors is bankruptcy securities.
Peter Cundill

You must stop this short term anticipation stuff.
Peter Cundill

There’s always something to do.
Peter Cundill



Like most value investors we start with the balance sheet.
Peter Cundill


Bonus

Like Warren Buffett and John Templeton, Peter Cundill was a legendary practioner of the ‘Value Approach according to Ben Graham.’
Prem Watsa

Peter [Cundill] popularised the concept of ‘Buying a dollar for 40 cents.’ – which is still the slogan of the Cundill Value Fund.
Prem Watsa



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