At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Barbara Ann Bernard of Wincrest Capital delivered a public recantation of her own 2019 speech at the same event, given from the same stage. The title of the new talk, “A Personal Evolution in Value Investing: From Anti-Bubbles to Bottlenecks and Structuring a Margin of Safety,” was a short summary of what had happened to her worldview in the intervening seven years.
She had stood on that stage in 2019 armed with a Bloomberg terminal, a stack of spreadsheets, and what she described as a gazillion air miles’ worth of on-the-ground emerging market research; (the presentation can be found below). She had talked about classic value investing, margin of safety, the weighing machine in the long run, and her deep belief that if the math was right the market would eventually have no choice but to reward patience. Her Canadian investors had read a writeup on the presentation in the Financial Post the next morning and emailed her to congratulate her. Even Prem Watsa had sent a note taking credit for having discovered her.
Nine months later, COVID hit, and the playbook broke.
The 2026 version of the talk was her attempt to explain what had actually changed, why the old framework had stopped working for the specific corner of the market she was in, and how she had rebuilt her process around a very different question: not where is value cheap, but where is the gravity of capital actually flowing, and how do I position myself in front of it.
Where Bernard was operating then, and where she’s operating now
Bernard runs Wincrest Capital out of Nassau in the Bahamas and originally built the firm around a global emerging markets equity strategy. she is the portfolio manager of the Wincrest Contraria Fund, which is a global long/short equity fund of niche, esoteric investment ideas based on bottom-up “Go-See” research.
Her mentor was Sir John Templeton, and she opened by quoting him. The line she used is the one that turned out to be the most important one for her over the last five years. Policies profitable in the last ten years will not necessarily be profitable in the next ten. Templeton believed that flexibility was essential to long-term outperformance, and that if you wanted better returns you had to be brave enough to do things differently from the crowd. Bernard said she had underappreciated how literally he meant it.
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