Ron Brierley Quotes
105 Ron Brierley Quotes
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[In September 2002.] I have no faith in large boards of directors, which tend to be at the top of a bureaucracy rather than a commercial organisation.
Ron Brierley
[In November 2002 on GPG.] It's sometimes seen as more of an IEL old boy's club and its profile is not great relative to the old IEL days. But it's focused on achievement - not profile and publicity. What happens, happens.
Ron Brierley
[In November 2002 on Gary Weiss.] When I first saw him, I couldn't reconcile it with the mental picture I had from these excellent references. It was definitely a meeting of minds on an intellectual basis and personally I related to his way of thinking as well.
Ron Brierley
[In November 2002.] We thought we were going to conquer the world. It was uncharted territory. We didn't know what lay ahead. Now it's previously charted territory and we have some idea of the end objective.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Many companies were, to put it crudely, worth more dead than alive. That is, their intrinsic value was greater than their sharemarket value.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] What triggered my interest [in the sharemarket] was the desire to make some money and the sharemarket seemed to be the purest way to do so. Investing in the market had a certain romantic appeal, but it was interesting as well. It just had all the ingredients that one was looking for in a business sense.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] The more one learnt, the more one became involved.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on his first sharemarket investment at the age of 18 in the Auckland Gas Company.] I bought Auckland Gas shares on the basis that it was going to be taken over by the Auckland City Council. I bought the shares… at around seven shillings. When they went up to 10 shillings on more speculation, I sold out, took a profit and realised to my surprise just how easy it was operating on the sharemarket.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Someone else I knew was investing in the sharemarket and one thing led to another. There was lots of gossip, rumours and tips, and all of that appealed. It’s a reasonably close connection to horse racing in terms of the gamble, but the stock market seemed a little bit safer.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on the size of his first investment in the sharemarket at the age of 18.] I had 50 pounds in a savings account which had built up over the years. I drew it out with great trepidation and put the money into Auckland Gas Shares. So that’s the scale. In 1955, for somebody who was 18, 50 pounds was quite a big punt.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Inspired by an employer of mine who didn’t know anything about racing but who purchased a racing tip sheet and managed to keep going, I thought, ‘Well, why doesn’t somebody do the same with the stock market? I’ll churn out a single sheet with tips and if they work out, fine, and if they don’t, well, shares rise and fall.’
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on his original marketing for his stock market tip sheet.] When I came to publish the thing, I found it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought. So I had to do some genuine writing and research, which I didn’t particularly welcome but it was a fantastic self-education in the sharemarket.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a direct participant.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Raising the capital was jolly hard work. But that’s how BIL got started.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I made a lot of bad judgements but one good judgement fairly early on was to recognise that Australia and New Zealand were one single market... So I came to Australia in 1963 to see what I could do here.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] The shares got down to very low levels so IEL made the usual start of buying AMP’s holding at the bottom of the market.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] One, these companies were more valuable than their share prices; secondly, there was nothing like a takeover offer for the company’s value to become apparent to all those who were seemingly unaware of it previously, including the board.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] If it was easy, then everyone would be doing it.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] There were distinct setbacks in New Zealand. There were distinct setbacks in Australia… But, in retrospect, those mistakes were tremendous because they gave one a practical education and experience. The worst thing today is when you get people in the stock market who have never taken a loss or never known a setback, because they don’t know how to cope with it when it happens.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Those early, very, very difficult days, early in the 1960s, were the making of BIL and IEL.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] At one stage, I was persuaded into putting the sum of 55,000 pounds, which was really big money - that’s Australian pounds - into a new venture called Video Box. These were juke boxes that also showed a film, which was pretty novel stuff in those days. It was an absolute disaster. Most of the 55,000 pounds was lost and while that was a huge setback, it was an absolute lesson not to divert from the basic philosophy because of greed or some easy gains. I think I can say that I’ve never consciously done that ever since.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on his mistake invested in Video Box.] No matter how well it worked, corporate raiding was my forte and I shouldn’t have been diverted. That was a very expensive lesson.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Balance sheet values can’t be accepted in terms of what they say. You’ve got to make your own assessment.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] You had to be very selective in terms of industries and location of assets and types of assets.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I’ve had the full range of disasters.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Guinness Peat Group always seems to be excessively liquid - because I don’t want to rely on borrowings or any outside influences. I like to, at least in theory, rely on having the cash to do what I want to do, entirely at my own discretion.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] The company was dirt cheap, but nobody wanted to know about it. That type of company proved to be an absolute gold mine for me.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] We were looking for value which was not represented in the share price and which was essentially unrecognised by others.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Value investing is never complete. There’s always something out there.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Some of them came from disciplined research. Others came from opportunism. You can pick up today’s newspaper and see a company that’s come out with a bad result, so there’s a distinct element of opportunism based not only on perceived value but also on strategy.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] GPG became very skilled and IEL became very skilled, somewhat controversially, in exploiting what you might call loopholes and inconsistencies and anomalies in various regulations and laws and conventions in order to gain a superior strategic position.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on thinking back to 1985 and then raiding it in 1986.] I can remember one morning when I said, ‘Have we ever looked at Woolworths?’ Woolworths was getting into lots of strife - it had a liquidity run at one stage and was not going forward as it traditionally had. One of our colleagues, who was reading the paper, put it down and said, ‘Too good for us, Ron’ and resumed reading his paper… So from being ‘Too good for you, Ron’ about six or twelve months later we were actively raiding Woolworths. It could be said that Woolworths was probably the greatest deal that IEL ever did.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] It was one of my specialities – to make takeover bids or raids at Easter or Christmas. We made one bid on Christmas Eve and all it succeeded in doing was stuffing up our Christmas. That taught me a lesson - no more raids on Christmas Eve.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I’d been on a trip to New Zealand and came back and discovered we’d bought 20 percent of Woolworths, which I was quite pleased and surprised about. I said, ‘Oh, I thought you said it was too good for us’ and someone said, ‘Oh, well, that was yesterday.’ [That someone was Peter Pedley, at the time their legendary chief investment analyst.]
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Woolworths was a very big property owner and had huge cash flow.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] Next thing we owned 100 percent of Woolworths at an overall cost of $925 million.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I had a lot of respect for Robert Holmes a Court, though it would have to be said that when the crash came, he turned out to be more exposed than anyone.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on the 1987 stock market crash.] It could be said that virtually all of our so-called competitors collapsed.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003.] I retired as chairman of BIL in 1990 and became founder/president. I thought that I would work loosely with management in terms of coming up with various ideas and running my own projects. But they obviously had different ideas. They didn’t want me involved at all really.
Ron Brierley
[In 2003 on hostile takeovers and raiders.] If you can get what you want amicably and by agreement, there’s absolutely no need to be hostile.
Ron Brierley
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