The London Value Investor Conference 2025 is in the books, bringing with it lots of interesting commentary and stock picks. Here are some of the most interesting ideas and presentations from this year’s conference.
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Simon Adler
Schroders’ Simon Adler talked about what happens when complex models sour. They start by looking for low valuations and then build a financial model using 10 years of history and forensic details. They ask why the stock is cheap and where the problem is and then value the business against the risks they found.
Adler didn’t share the name of the stock pick that went wrong, but he did say they found it as part of the 20% of the cheapest companies on the market. They did 94 iterations of the model and found seven key risks, always focusing on cash conversion.
They consider what would happen in the event of financial stress or macro situations and are happy to buy bad businesses if they’re cheap enough. After considering all the risks and valuing the business based on enterprise value and normalized profits, they didn’t end up buying it because it wasn’t cheap enough. Instead, they bought it six months later, but the investment went bad, and Schroders lost 75% of its capital.
M&A led to huge value destruction, margins plunged to 1.3%, and the company faced massive fines.
Dan O'Keefe
Artisan Partners’ Dan O’Keefe said they’re long Shell, which was severely damaged by the ESG trends of a few years ago. However, Shell still outperformed BP as BP paid more attention to ESG.
Shell has lower debt, ROE is in line, high dividends versus peers and trades at a 50% discount of 9x P/E versus 14x of peers. Shell CEO is buying shares to narrow the discount, and the share count is down 20% with a 50% return including dividends.
O’Keefe said even if the discount versus Shell’s peers never narrows, it doesn’t matter because it’s paying dividends and repurchasing shares. Thus, he gets a good return even if the multiple holds stead.
Alissa Corcoran
Kopernik Global Investors’ Alissa Corcoran spoke as part of the Immortality of Value Investing Panel, making the case for emerging markets stocks and real assets. EM accounts for 90% of the population, most of the world’s land, and most of the global GDP growth. However, EMs have taken hits from a lack of the rule of law. Meanwhile, EMs have less debt than developed markets and are trading at 70% discount to DMs.
Corcoran spoke about a Brazilian stock
