Walter Castle

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Walter Jerome Schloss (born August 28, 1916 in New York City ; † February 19, 2012 there ) was an American value investor and fund manager . He is one of those people who in the essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville of Warren Buffett mentioned.

Schloss was born in 1916 to a Jewish merchant family and grew up in Manhattan, New York . After the initially wealthy family had lost their fortune due to the stock market crash of 1929 , Schloss began to work as an errand boy for a New York investment company in 1935, initially without any professional training . Out of interest in their business conduct, he applied there as an analyst , but was rejected; one of the employees referred him to the then newly published book Security Analysis and its author Benjamin Graham .

After serving in the Army in World War II , he got a job at Graham's investment firm Graham-Newman & Co. in 1946, where he met Warren Buffett , with whom he temporarily shared an office. Shortly before the end of Graham-Newman in 1955, Schloss went into business for himself with an investment fund in the form of a limited partnership . Its earnings development left the US benchmark index S&P 500 well behind for decades until the fund was liquidated in 2002. Despite this success, Castle remained virtually unknown on Wall Street for a long time.

Schloss's investment strategy was based very much on the original methods of Benjamin Graham and was far less influenced by other writers and investors, as is the case with Warren Buffett. Schloss had less of a company's future prospects in mind than its substance. Schloss also did not operate the focus on a few and therefore all the larger holdings demanded by Philip Fisher or Charles Munger . He justified this with his inability to adequately assess managers and business models. Nevertheless, he had to adapt his strategy a little over time to the changed framework conditions.

Walter Schloss was a close friend of Warren Buffett's life. What they both had in common was strict economy. Schloss initially ran his fund from a half-rented junk room as a subtenant for the broker and investment firm Tweedy, Browne (sic!). His son Edwin, who joined the company in 1973, remained the only employee of the company alongside Walter.

Walter Schloss was married twice. His first marriage had two children, his son Edwin and a daughter. After the death of his first wife in 2000, he remarried in 2001 and survived his second wife. Schloss died of leukemia on February 19, 2012 at the age of 95 in his Manhattan apartment in New York City .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schroeder, Alice: Warren Buffett: Life is like a snowball . 1st edition. FinanzBook-Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-89879-412-1 , pp. 177 f .
  2. ↑ Smith, Adam: Supermoney . 1st edition. Random House, New York 1972, ISBN 0-394-47993-9 .
  3. ↑ Buffett, Warren E.: The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville . In: The Intelligent Investor . updated with new commentary by Jason Zweig. rev. 1st edition. HarperCollins, New York 2006, ISBN 978-0-06-055566-5 , pp. 537 ff .
  4. ↑ see various interviews with Walter Schloss, including: “Sixty-five years on Wall Street”: Remarks by Walter Schloss, founder Walter & Edwin Schloss Associates. In: Grant's Interest Rate Observer
  5. ↑ Schroeder, Alice: Warren Buffett: Life is like a snowball . 1st edition. FinanzBook-Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-89879-412-1 , pp. 360 f .
  6. ↑ Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (Ed.): 2006 Annual Report . 2007, p. 22 ( berkshirehathaway.com [PDF; accessed February 25, 2012]).
personal data
SURNAME Castle, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Castle, Walter Jerome (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American investor
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2012
Place of death new York