About

How This Site Began

I founded my small publishing venture  Independent Investor after becoming fascinated by the way that professional investors set out to make money. I wanted to share some of what I have learnt over the past 25 years with a wider audience.  My early career as a full-time professional journalist, during which I worked as a senior correspondent in the pages of The Times of London, The Economist and The Independent,  involved writing extensively about companies, privatisation and financial markets, though only indirectly at that stage about stock market investment. In 1990, after spending two years managing investor relations for a large oil company, I spent a formative year at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying for a Master’s degree, during which was able to do extensive further research into the practice of professional investment, culminating in a thesis on the methods of Warren Buffett.

Since returning to the UK, I have continued to advance my knowledge in various capacities, writing a newspaper column for the past 17 years (initially in The Independent and latterly for the Financial Times) and three books on investment. I combine this work with a variety of professional investment roles. I am a non-executive director of three investment companies, serve on the investment committee of a London property fund, and, besides Independent Investor, have been a founder shareholder in two new business ventures – a Brazilian farmland venture (Agrifirma Brazil, recently renamed Genagro) and the innovative news digest The Week.

The idea behind Independent Investor has always been to make available to a wider audience a carefully chosen selection of the ideas and insights of the best professional investors. In the course of my research over the years, I have been fortunate to get to know many of the brightest talents in the investment business. Most investment funds, it is well known, fail to add value for their investors; and the track record of many advisors/wealth management firms has been, if anything, even worse. The financial services world has always been a marketing-led business, in which providers compete – often quite cynically – to take advantage of investor ignorance in search of easy profits.

Hard Truths About Investment

“Never has so much been earned by so many for doing so little” is how Charlie Ellis, the great investment consultant, describes the economics of the investment management business.  One of the most important lessons I took away from my year at MIT – one shared by Paul Samuelson and Warren Bufffett himself – is an appreciation of the value of index funds and ETFs, which remain the default investment vehicle of choice for most investment purposes, and are now thankfully widely (if not yet freely) available.

But that does not mean that there is nothing that can be learnt from studying the methods of those handful of exceptional professional investors – the Warren Buffetts, John Templetons and Anthony Boltons of this world – who have not only demonstrated that they can beat the market consistently over time, but are driven by something slightly more elevated than simply a desire to take money off their clients or investors. It is those rare beasts whose ideas Independent Investor is really interested in tracking down and sharing with readers through a variety of media – conferences, books, newsletters, blogs and podcasts among them. Independent Investor LLP is an independent research and publishing business wholly owned by myself and my family.

There are plenty of reasons for seeking to understand and stay in tune with the way that the best professionals are thinking.  I have found that listening carefully to the opinions of those with market clout helps enormously in identifying the turning points in the investment cycle – nobody can do it precisely, but the effort needs to be made. Similarly too, the smartest investors are almost always early – often too early – in identifying the longer term themes that are going to shape the way that markets behave.  Spotting that gold was going to be one of the star performers of the last decade would be a good example.

The global credit crunch is another: it is simply not the case that nobody saw it coming. Independent Investor published an uncannily prophetic 200-page report by the historian Edward Chancellor in 2006 entitled The Coming Credit Crunch? Anybody who read that, nor been to one of my London  seminars, would not have been caught unawares when the debt and equity markets imploded in 2008. Nor, I think it is fair to say, had they read some of the articles on this site, should they have missed out on the great equity market rebound that began in March 2009.

I hope therefore that anybody who has read this far will be persuaded to sample some of  the material on this site. As a matter of policy Independent Investor does not seek, nor is it authorised, to give investment advice. It would be impossible to do so without detailed knowledge of an individual’s circumstances and risk profile. Readers should always take specialist advice before making investment decisions. What I hope Independent Investor can do, by sharing the ideas and insights of the most admirable professional investors, is to help you reach better investment judgements in future.

Jonathan Davis

Personal Qualifications

MA in History, Cambridge University

MSc in Management, MIT, Sloan School of Management

IMC (Investment Management Certificate)

Professional

Founder, JDA Independent Investor LLP

Investment Director, Genagro Services Ltd

Non-Executive Director, Jupiter Primadona Growth Trust

Non-Executive Director, Victoria Private Management Office

Investment Committee, London Prime Capital Fund

Published Books

Money Makers

Investing With Anthony Bolton

Templeton’s Way With Money