Graham And Doddsville

I recently discovered a great PBS Site for an NBR series called “Your Mind and Your Money.” I highly recommend taking some time to read and watch the interviews they have posted.  One interview in particular features Columbia Business School Professor and Legg Mason Chief Strategist Michael Mauboussin.

(You can view the transcript here.)

While it has been a while since I have posted a new entry, I continue to add interesting articles, websites, blogs, and other useful resources.

Each year, approximately 20 Columbia MBA students are accepted into a semester long seminar called: Advanced Investment Research – The Analyst’s Edge.  The Class was developed and is taught by John Griffin and David Greenspan (MBA ’00) of  Blue Ridge Capital.  I can honestly say that spending a semester in this class, which was visited by David Einhorn, Bill Ackman, and Ian McKinnon, among others, created an experience that would be quite difficult to match.

Our final stock pitch was delivered in the boardroom of Tiger Management to legendary hedge fund manager, Julian Robertson.  This was just another of the many once-in-a-lifetime experiences provided by Columbia Business School and The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing.

Below is a 1998 interview of Julian Robertson by Charlie Rose:

(Hat Tip to MarketFolly.com)

Columbia Business School Alumnus and Applied Value Investing Professor Paul Sonkin, who runs Hummingbird Value Fund, is a well-known micro-cap investor.  He is not only a co-author (with Bruce Greenwald) of Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond, but is also featured on pp. 276 – 291.   Thanks to GuruFocus.com, I just came across an interview of Professor Sonkin with Robert Lenzer of Forbes.com from August 2009.

I recently came across this interview with Michael Mauboussin who is a Columbia Business School Adjunct Professor and Strategist of Legg Mason.  Mauboussin’s new book, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition hits bookshelves on October 12, 2009.  If it lives up to his past books, it will become a must read.  I highly recommend checking out Cap@Columbia.  The site provides a wealth of content on investing, including articles written by Michael Mauboussin.   For those of you who live in the NY/NJ area, Professor Mauboussin will be speaking about his new book on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at The New York Society of Securities Analysts (NYSSA).  Click here for more information on the NYSSA event.

There has been a lot of talk about Professor Greenwald’s new book, “The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies”.  The book was co-written by Bruce Greenwald, Jonathan Knee, and Ava Seave.  All three are on the faculty of Columbia Business School.  To learn more about the book, check out the post on Columbia Business School’s Public Offering Blog here or Columbia Ideas at Work here.

Finally, I have created a new archive page for the Graham and Doddsville newsletter produced by the students of Columbia Business School.  This morning at the 19th Annual Graham and Dodd Breakfast I learned that a new issue is imminent.  I will post it to the archive as soon as it is released.

Michael Hirsch wrote an interesting article in Newsweek about one person who is missing from President-elect Obama’s economic team – Nobel Prize winning economist and Columbia Professor Joseph Stiglitz.  It is an interesting critique given Professor Stiglitz’s background and experience, as described by Hirsch.  The article also quotes colleague Bruce Greenwald.

Read the article here.

Columbia Professor Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn have released their newest joint-venture:  “globalization: n. the irrational fear that someone in China will take your job.”  I spent as much time as possible in classes with Professor Greenwald (even before I was eligible to enroll for them), and can vividly hear him exclaiming the title.  I have not yet read the book, but hope to pick it up this week.  Here is a brief excerpt of the press release:

To its critics, globalization is a terrible development that makes almost everybody worse off and threatens the survival of the planet. They blame it for everything from mass poverty in Africa and Latin America to the falling living standards for workers in Europe and North America. In contrast, globalization’s advocates argue that it is the greatest force for good in human history, a powerful institution for improving the quality of life around the world. The underlying problem with both of these positions, says Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn, authors of Globalization: n. the irrational fear that someone in China will take your job, is that they are based on certain accepted truths that are either highly questionable or largely false.

You can read the press release from Wiley here.

Listen to Professor Greenwald defending his thesis on the Biz Radio Network here.

For more on Professor Greenwald, see the recent blog entries (here, here, here, and here) on the Columbia Business School Blog: Public Offering.