[校园风光] Columbia Business School MBA校友答疑（六）value investing

myice

Regarding what you will get from an MBA program in CBS and Value Investing In your preparation for sell-side, particularly investment bank, you will spend a lot of time doing mock interviewing, networking - because that's the nature of the business; it's people business.

But if you are trying to develop your career in hedge fund/asset management sector, you will prepare in a totally different way: you see people ended up with the best job offer tend to spend the least time doing social. They are reading,  about companies and sectors, news, legal documents, filings, building models, interviewing company management team, industry experts, conducting ground research (in Columbia, shame on those people who conduct research based on sell-side reports). At the end of the day, you my have best friends as partners in hedge fund, but if you can't bring your investment idea and pitch them in a consice and compelling way, you end up nowhere.

Here by "career in hedge fund/asset management", I don't mean the asset management branches of bulge brackets, and I don't mean quantitative funds like D.E. Shaw, Renaissance, etc; I don't mean macro strategy funds like Soros, either. I mean value-investing (classic) style event-driven funds like Pershing Square, Third Point, Joel Greenblatt and David Greenhoin, I mean "deep value" guys like Seth Klarman, Martin Whitman and those credit guys doing distressed and bankruptcy investment, etc, and bottom-up foundamental research-driven funds trying to identify competitive advantages, such as the tiger-cubs, Blue Ridge (not their Chinese PE operation), Viking Global, Shumway and Kylin, etc. And of course, Warren Buffett has done all of the above.

Money managers can't be trained in classroom - people have to learn by following their practitioner mentors, understanding business, and knowing who are the market participants; people have to learn by making mistakes and reverse-engineering great investment cases. There is no such magic model which you throw a few numbers in, and it will run out "investment ideas" automatically.

If you want to know more, suggest you visit the value investing center of CBS http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/valueinvesting/. Every year, there are only 40 second-years being admitted to the Applied Value Investing Program, divided by 4 sections, namely "event-driven", "business franchise", "distressed",etc. Four hedge fund gurus will each teach one section. in 2011, Joel Greenblatt will teach event-driven section and Martin Whitman will teach distressed (they are "Jack Nicklauses" in those types of investment). I have to say, Columbia is not famous for "politician-like" leaders, larger-than-life tech whiz kids, or professors or quants...you may find these types of career are easy to develop in other school; however, Columbia develops best fund managers. The brutal honesty and humbleness required in practising value investing generates least corporate and investment scandals, and best long-term track record.

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