Value Investing Congress

I was going to do some live blogging from the VIC this week in Pasadena until I found out the conference didn’t have wireless.  Instead, I took a bunch of notes to post later (ie did you know Lebanon has 30% of their GDP in gold?), but then noticed that Zain at The Manual of Ideas did a far superior job of live blogging the conference.  I’ll link to their blogs below, and then chat a bit about my take on things.

I love going to these conferences, and the concept of tracking the smart money is one of the reasons we started AlphaClone.  Wayyyy back at the end of 2006 we started tracking a group of 10 hedge funds I like (Baupost, Berkshire, Blue Ridge, Eminence, Greenlight, Lone Pine, Maverick, Okumus, Private, and Tiger).

The portfolio of the 10 most popular ideas amongst these funds has outperformed the market by 14% a year since 2000, and is beating the market by over 25% YTD in 2009.  That is astonishing to me (and even includes one fund imploding).  At the end of the year we replaced Okumus with Appaloosa – and their clone is absolutely destroying the market this year.

Summaries below (I’m trying to get the guys to let me post the PowerPoints as well). More later.

DAY ONE

David Nierenberg, D3

David Chu & Igor Lotsvin, Soma Asset Management

Zeke Ashton, Centaur Capital

Charles de Vaulx, International Value Advisors

Brian Gaines, Springhouse Capital

John Burbank, Passport Capital

Gus Spier, Aquamarine Capital

Jed Nussdorf, Soapstone Capital

Dave Rabinowitz, Kirkwood Capital

DAY TWO

William Waller & Jason Stock, M3 Funds

Scott Klein, Beach Point

J. Carlo Cannell  Cannell Capital

Whitney Tilson & Glenn Tongue, T2 Partners, Presentation here