Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference: Sionna’s Kim Shannon – The 20-Year Inflationary Cycle Has Already Started

At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Kim Shannon of Sionna Investment Managers made an argument that bottom-up stock pickers don’t usually make in public. Her whole discipline, she acknowledged, is built around ignoring macro. Value managers are proud of it. They start their presentations with companies, not with economic forecasts, and they tend to treat the top-down view as somebody else’s problem. Her talk, “Waiting for Godot: The Dilemma of the Ignored Value Rally,” was a pitch for why that instinct is wrong at certain moments in history, and why this happens to be one of them.

Her core claim was that the asset management industry is sitting on top of a regime change it hasn’t fully processed. The long disinflationary period that started in 1981 is over. A new inflationary cycle started in the summer of 2020, and if history is any guide it will run for at least another fifteen to twenty years. That regime shift, in her reading of a century of data, is the single biggest tailwind value investing has had in her career, and almost nobody is positioned for it. The value rally, she argued, has already started. The industry hasn’t noticed yet.

Where Shannon is coming from, and why the argument matters

Shannon is a Canadian value manager who has been doing the job for more than forty years and has been making public macro calls at this conference and others for almost as long. Her $3 billion AUM firm, Sionna Investment Managers, is built around bottom-up stock selection, and she was careful to note that she is not abandoning that discipline.

There are moments in the cycle when the market is resetting the odds for every value manager over the next decade, and at those moments a pure bottom-up investor is leaving real information on the table. Her example of somebody who gets this right was Prem Watsa of Fairfax, who she noted is considered one of the greatest Canadian value managers in part because he reads the rare macro turning points correctly and positions around them. She pointed to his flip on fixed income in 2020 as the most recent example and reminded the room what Fairfax did in the years that followed.

She also took a moment to describe the state of the business she is in, because the context matters. Value investing peaked as a share of global active large-cap allocations back in 2006, when it was somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the book. It has shrunk more or less continuously since then, and today sits at 5 to 10 percent. Passive has taken the top end, private equity has taken the bottom end, and active in general has been squeezed in the middle, with value the biggest casualty. Value managers are running below half of their peak AUM. The phrase Shannon used for the current moment was “the mother of all contrarian bets” as almost nobody is in value anymore.