The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World's Greatest Investors You've Never Heard Of and What You Can Learn From Them

Chapter 7. The Oracle of Manitoba

Investor: Randy McDuff

Date of Birth: January 4, 1965

Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba

Personal Web Site: None

Employment: Former stockbroker, currently investing full-time

Passions/Pursuits: Comic book collecting, cycling, and his three dogs

Investment Strategy: Value with a global macro twist, "Warren Buffett meets John Templeton"

Brokerage Account: Not available

Key Strategy Metric: Enterprise value/Ebitda

Online Haunts: www.marketocracy.com, www.cia.gov, www.valueinvestorclub.com

Best Pick: MasterCard, Up 606 percent

Worst Pick: Kindred Healthcare, Down 75 percent

Performance Since July 2000: Average annual return +19 percent versus 20.70 percent for the S&P 500^[31]

There are few more unlikely incubators for outstanding investors than The Pas, Manitoba. Perched on the shore of the Saskatchewan River, this former trapper Mecca is sometimes called The Gateway to the North. It's a place where Hudson Bay winds can chill the air to minus 40 degrees in January and folks are accustomed to waiting eight months for winter to give way to the flowers of springtime. It's also the hometown of Randolph McDuff, an individual investor who, at age 45, has a better performance record than the vast majority of professionals who are paid millions to manage pensions, 401(k)s, mutual funds, and hedge funds.

Like most others in this book, McDuff has no fancy MBA, is not a CFA or CPA, and was not trained as a financial analyst. It may be that the education he received living in remote ...