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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LauA who wrote (20620)	2/7/2005 1:18:39 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78714

VSH: Right. I believe part of VSH strategy is to grow by acquisitions. Their major American competitor (Kemet)at least once rebuffed an offer by them. Branding is probably irrelevant to the business. Competing on cost (against strongly capitalized Asian competitors) is likely #1, followed by time-to-delivery. (Sometimes customers experience spot shortages when times are good, so managing customer relationships is important.) Product innovation by VSH sometimes helps in creating added value in an otherwise (imo) commodity business. --------------- No patience now to read the entire Grantham article. Not too thrilled with this guy from what I can read of him lately. He's very bearish - very public about it - and consequently in his advice. He says he is net short in his own account. But for the funds he manages he says (it is reported) that he loses too many customers by being so extreme in his bearish views when he acts on this in his funds. So he goes ahead and buys stocks for the fund to keep customers. A criticism I read of this is that here we have a long-time, high-level, successful big fund(s) manager - so likely he is now worth zillions of dollars - and yet at this point in his life he STILL is not willing to walk-the-walk; he is just not willing to do what he believes is right. In article you referenced, he seems to justify all this. However, his divergence between beliefs and actions is a valid criticism of the man, and perhaps a microcosm of how some fund managers go against their beliefs in their quest for personal profits. Perhaps also, another confirming sign of why individuals have to be wary of fund managers.