Ian Lance

Again, performed very, very well.

So really, it was buying what we thought were sort of decent companies at a time when they were offered at very, very low valuations and then keeping hold of them.

We define cheap by looking at where we think a company's earnings potentially is not where its earnings is today.

We think that people typically focus too much on short-term earnings, actually.

So COVID is a brilliant example of that.

Obviously, you know, we'd gone into this lockdown, the economy had gone into a downturn.

Lots of companies, their earnings went down, they passed their dividends, et cetera, et cetera.

And what people have a tendency to do is basically anchor off that and they just kind of can't see how things are ever going to recover.

What we tend to do is say, right, look, at some stage this will end, earnings will recover.

Where do we think they can get back to?

And we kind of try to look three to five years out and then basically value the business of where we think the earnings can get back to.

Because it's simple, not easy.

There's actually a book called Simple, Not Easy, and it perfectly sums up value investing, which is, you're absolutely right.

The mechanics of doing that are not particularly difficult.

The difficult bit is the psychological bit.

It's the buying stocks, which the share price has probably just gone down a lot.

Everyone hates them.

Everyone tells you you're an absolute clown to be buying those.

You do not know that we're in the middle of a recession and yada, yada, yada.

I often say, you know, when we put up our top 10 holdings, people often feel slightly nauseous looking at the companies that we own.