Investing Against the Tide Summary and Review |  Anthony Bolton

Read time: 10 min

Lessons From a Life Running Money

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Life gets busy. Has Investing Against the Tide been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now.

We’re scratching the surface here. If you don’t already have the book, order the book or get the audiobook for free to learn the juicy details.

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About Anthony Bolton

Anthony Bolton is one of the most well-known and successful investment fund managers in the UK. From December 1979 until December 2007, he oversaw the Fidelity Special Situations fund. A £1,000 investment became £147,000 over the course of this 28-year period thanks to the fund’s annualized return of 19.5%, which was far higher than the stock market’s overall growth of 13.5%.

Bolton graduated from Cambridge University and Stowe School with degrees in engineering and business studies. He pursued a career in the area, and at the age of 29, Fidelity hired him to be one of their first investment managers in London. He is currently Fidelity International Limited’s President of Investments and the manager of Fidelity China Special Situations PLC.

Introduction

Sometimes, it merely seems as though the stock market has gone bonkers. In such circumstances, it is crucial to keep in mind the advice of Anthony Bolton, one of the finest investors in British history. According to Bolton, bull markets hide fractures while bear markets reveal them. Keep this in mind because cracks can always be found in some form.

It resembles a smiley face. It smiles back at you when you look at it one way, but when you turn it around, it appears aged and unhappy.

In this lesson, we’ll learn how to flourish in volatile stock market environments. And here is a list of the book Investing Against the Tide by Anthony Bolton’s top five lessons.

StoryShot #1: Conviction is based on a number of distinct facts and components.

At the time, Peter Lynch and other renowned investors worked at Fidelity, where Anthony Bolton was one of the fund managers. He spent his whole 28-year career there, learning a ton about how to succeed by making investments in small and mid-sized businesses.

Bolton concluded that during his earlier years as an investment manager, the world of investing had undergone a significant transformation. Finding knowledge that others didn’t have or hadn’t noticed was the main goal. Contrarily, today, information is widely available, and the key to outperforming the rest of the investment world is to evaluate that information more adeptly than anybody else.

You will feel more confident when you invest against the grain and be less likely to make costly errors if you have a disciplined process for reviewing numerous discrete factors and elements before making your investment decisions. Anthony takes a bottom-up strategy to investing. He evaluates a company’s stock in six key areas before making a purchase, and he only does so if he is convinced after adding up all six of these aspects.

1) A strong franchise

One of the most effective inquiries to ensure a successful business franchise is this one:

How likely is it that the company will still exist in ten years and be worth more than it is now?

2) OUTSTANDING MANAGEMENT

The way in which they are compensated is more significant than what the management is doing.

Strong performance will frequently result from strong performance incentives.

Low valuation (#3)

This will be discussed in StoryShot #2.

4) POWERFUL FINANCIALS

This will be discussed in StoryShot #3.

5) TAKEOVER TARGET

Small and medium-sized businesses are more likely to be target companies for takeovers. Therefore, you’ll frequently gain a lot as a shareholder if your company is bought out by a rival.

6) APPROPRIATE TECHNIQUES

Bolt concluded that his advantage comes from combining fundamental analysis with pricing data.

He is looking for a business with an alluring narrative whose price has not yet reflected its allure. As a result, he often steers clear of stocks that have had rapid growth. Let’s say I increased 200% in three years or something

Newspapers are one source of some information. Several from yearly reports, possibly a few from other analysts, manager interviews, etc. Since the information is, by nature, unstructured, it is up to you as an investor to put it in order. So that it can be used to inform investment decisions, for instance, you could grade each of these six characteristics on a scale of zero to five, with five being the greatest possible score.

It takes time to complete this task effectively. Next, we’ll look at ways to choose businesses that are worth look at ways to choose businesses that are worth further research.