Ivey’s 2026 Ben Graham Conference: Francis Chou Details Three Big Returns In Insurance Vehicles Using Grahamian Principles

At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Francis Chou delivered the luncheon keynote with a diffident tone of a founder who has been quietly compounding money for four decades and would rather show you the numbers than talk about himself. His presentation, “Ben Graham Insurance Edition,” set out to make a narrow and slightly unusual claim. The principles that Ben Graham laid out for investing in securities, he argued, are not actually principles about securities. They are principles about mispricing, and they work in any market where a disciplined buyer can find a dollar bill selling for fifty cents. Equities, junk bonds, investment grade bonds, primary insurance, reinsurance.

The reason Chou has been able to build a $500 million value-investment business out of that insight, in his telling, is not that he is especially brilliant, although that certainly helps in his case. It is that he has been willing to apply the framework to corners of the market even most Graham-and-Dodd investors would never touch, and to build the balance sheet structures that let him act on mispricings when they appear. The talk was a walk through of those corners, Stonetrust and Loggerhead, and a third one he formed just last year called Win Re.

How Chou ended up running a value-investing insurance platform

Chou’s background was emphasized out in his introduction and is worth repeating because it frames everything that came next. He was born in India to Chinese parents, emigrated to Canada in 1976 without a formal college education and took a job at Bell Canada as a telephone repairman. Someone at Bell introduced him to Graham’s writing, and by 1981 he had started an investment club with six colleagues from the phone company.

He left Bell in 1984 to join Gardiner Watson as an analyst, which is where he first met Prem Watsa. The investment club eventually became the Chou Associates Fund in 1996, and in 2004 Morningstar named him fund manager of the decade. He now runs roughly $800 million across five mutual funds and two insurance subsidiaries, Stonetrust and Loggerhead.