Do you think that everyone and anyone can be a superior value investor?

The difference between potential and realised potential is whether you are just a parrot or true practitioner of the teachings of value investing.

You can read all the books on value investing, but the moment prices move abruptly and you mentally freeze, you might as well just be contented to be an average investor. Nothing shameful of being an average investor, as long you reach your financial goals safely

Hi Leo! That is a fascinating question you asked. My take is that everyone can be a good investor with the right behaviour, but only a few can be superior.

On the first point, I had discussed why investors lose money in the stock market in an article in my personal investing blog. The TL;DR version of my article is that investors succumb to greed and fear; and investors invest without knowing what they're investing in.

On the second point, I'll use football as an analogy. If everyone trains hard, they likely can be a competent football player that can pass and tackle. But not everyone can be a Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo - they are innately talented. I also discussed a similar point in another article in my blog. The relevant excerpts are below:

"The analytical edge is where you’re able to process information differently and come up with better insights compared to most. I believe, like Huber does, that this is still possible. Give two investors the exact same information about a company and it’s highly likely they will arrive at a different conclusion about its attractiveness as an investment opportunity.

As a great example, we can look at Mastercard and how investors Chuck Akre and Mohnish Pabrai think about the credit card company.

Akre runs the Akre Focus Fund, which has generated an impressive annual return of 16.8% from inception in August 2009 through to 30 September 2019. Over the same period, the S&P 500’s annual return was just 13.5%. Pabrai also has a fantastic long-term record. His fund’s annual return of 13.3% from 1999 to 30 June 2019 is nearly double that of the US market’s 7.0%.

At the end of September 2019, Mastercard made up 10% of the Akre Focus Fund. So clearly, Akre thinks highly of the company. Pabrai, on the other hand, made it very clear in a recent interview that he wouldn’t touch Mastercard with a 10-feet barge pool. In the October 2019 edition of Columbia Business School’s investing newsletter, Graham and Doddsville, Pabrai said:

“Is MasterCard a compounder? Yeah. But what’s the multiple? I can’t even look. Investing is not about buying great businesses, it’s about making great investments. A great compounder may not be a great investment.”

The fact that two highly accomplished stock market investors can have wildly differing views on the same company means that it is possible for us to develop an analytical edge. But it is not easy to achieve. In fact, I have a hunch that the ability to consistently produce differentiated insight may be an innate talent that some investors possess and others don’t."