A Quote Of A Dramatis Personum In The Conrad Black Case

Value investor Christopher Browne, of Tweedy, Browne (the firm that Laura Jerski is with) got quoted in today's issue of the E-zine The Daily Reckoning. It's in the main article, written by Christopher Hancock. Here's the quote:

As value investor Christopher Browne points out, there is nothing wrong with owning a great business that grows at fantastic rates… it's a matter of paying the right price for that business.

Browne goes on to say that investors should determine an intrinsic value, wait for someone to overreact or under-react to news and buy the stock when the market prices the shares for less than they're worth.

The quote appears in a primer on 'value' investing in the broader sense, through using the ups and downs of a hypothetical company in the medical biotech industry called "CureAll Pharmaceuticals" along with a mention of a real up and down that I remember myself - Yahoo!, which went from $432.69/share as of the end of 1999 to about $25/share as of the end of 2000.

(If you're up on Austrian economics, you'll love this statement near the end of the intro to the issue linked to above: "Cheap money is making a lot of things a lot dearer than they used to be." It seems to be a double-meaning in-joke; at any rate, it packs a certain charm in it.)