annual general meeting. Reuniting with friends from hither and yon is always enjoyable, but I confess to having been in need of a diet before the four-day festival and more so after it.
Mr. Graham managed money and was sorely tested by the great crash of 1929. His experience led to the 1934 bookfollowed in 1949, and Mr. Graham revised both books several times before he passed away in 1976. He also taught at Columbia Business School and founded the successful Graham-Newman Corp., the latter akin to a modern closed-end fund.
Importantly, Mr. Graham kept his fund small; in the 1950s he only managed roughly a hundred million dollars in today’s terms, which goes to the question of capacity. After all, it’s easier to outperform with a relatively small portfolio than a very large one.shareholders to moderate their expectations for the firm now that it has grown to a stupendous size.
The fund outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 3.2 percentage points annually from its inception in 1998 through to the end of 2023 and beat the S&P Small Cap 600 Pure Value index by an average of 2.1 percentage points annually over the 10 years to the end of 2023. So it is still possible for value-oriented portfolio managers to beat the broad market in the modern era.