Value

Is it me? Or is "Value" investments getting harder and harder to find these days?
It used to be just going on hoovers, doing a couple of screens, and you'd be able to find a few ideas to research on, but now it's taking so much time just to find one or two!

The typical S&P 500 company is now trading at about 15 - 20x earnings--can we say overvalued? Companies trading for cheap these days actually have a good reason to be cheap, unless the investor can somehow hedge against the risks of downside of course. We are forced to become more creative and more sensical in our valuations, and not simply be able to project numbers on a forward basis. It's really tempting to just settle for the 10x cash and hope it will go to 15x soon enough... but we are sticking to our dicipline!

And nevertheless, since the IAG portfolios will be running "value" strategies this year, we are confident that in the areas where institutional investors and wall street at large do not see, we will be able to find good investments. Though nobody says that this is an easy process :(