THE WALTER SCHLOSS ARCHIVE

We are pleased to announce the launch of The Walter Schloss Archive.

Born in August 1916, Walter Schloss was a legend of Wall Street and a notable proponent of the Benjamin Graham School of Value Investing. He did not attend college and was hired as a runner on Wall Street at the age of 18. He took investment courses taught by Benjamin Graham at the New York Stock Exchange Institute and eventually went to work for Mr Graham in the Graham-Newman Partnership, where he met Warren Buffett. In 1955, Walter Schloss started his own fund and, over the next four and a half decades, delivered his investors (which numbered 92 at their peak) annualised returns of 15.3% versus 10% for the S&P 500, an achievement matched by few other investors. In 1984, he was named by Warren Buffett as one of the Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville in an article published in the 1984 issue of Hermes, Columbia Business School’s magazine, where Mr Buffett sought to disprove the academic position that the market is efficient and that beating the S&P 500 was “pure chance”. Warren Buffett had this to say about Walters Schloss: “He knows how to identify securities that sell at considerably less than their value to a private owner; And that’s all he does ... He owns many more stocks than I do and is far less interested in the underlying nature of the business; I don't seem to have very much influence on Walter. That is one of his strengths; No one has much influence on him.” Walter Schloss closed his fund in 2000 and stopped actively managing other people’s money in 2003. He passed away at the age of 95 in February 2015 and left a history of writing/s that we can all learn from today. Although we never had the privilege of meeting Mr Schloss we have created this archive because the articles and writings still remain relevant for investors today.

Please explore the archive here.