Welcome to Value Situations

A newsletter about undervalued situations in the public equity markets.

Welcome to Value Situations, by me Conor Maguire.

Value Situations is an investment ideas and research newsletter dedicated to identifying mispriced or undervalued companies and situations in the public equity markets.

I’m a former private equity investment professional, having previously worked at one of the largest private investment firms in the world where I originated, invested and managed a diverse range of investments across private credit, direct equity, special situations and public equities strategies.

You can get a good overview of my framework and what this newsletter aims to offer in the About section but essentially I combine a fundamental value philosophy with a private equity / special situations approach to public equities.

I’m interested in what I believe are truly undervalued companies or situations and so am not necessarily looking to find the highest quality businesses or compounders.

I firmly believe that investment returns are ultimately a function of the price paid for a security, and the price paid must be determined by reference to its intrinsic or fundamental value with an appropriate margin of safety. As Howard Marks wrote in The Most Important Thing, “High quality assets can be risky, and low quality assets can be safe. It’s just a matter of the price paid for them.” Or to put it another way, almost everything has a value at the right price.

The newsletter will focus primarily on the European and US equity markets, seeking out opportunities with 50% - 100%+ upside, with credible catalysts to realise fundamental value within a 2-3 year horizon.

Equally important to me is downside protection - I am not willing to underwrite “catastrophe risk” so I’m not interested in companies or situations that potentially offer 10x upside but which could also go to zero. I do however accept that I can (and will sometimes) be wrong and so I seek to quantify how much an idea could lose in a plausible worst case scenario.

Finally, investing involves an implicit risk/reward trade-off and so I look for those ideas with a positive and strongly asymmetric return vs. risk profile, where the upside is a multiple of the estimated downside risk. This asymmetry criterion reinforces the principle of downside protection while increasing the probability of a positive outcome for the idea.

Hopefully this newsletter offers something of value to readers, and feedback is welcome.

Thanks for reading and please share with friends and colleagues!

Disclaimer

Value Situations is NOT investment advice and the author is not an investment advisor.

All content on this website and in the newsletter, and all other communication and correspondence from its author, is for informational and educational purposes only and should not in any circumstances, whether express or implied, be considered to be advice of an investment, legal or any other nature.  Please carry out your own research and due diligence.