Century Management's Philosophy

Century Management's primary objective in managing assets is to preserve clients' capital. Since inception, Century Management has applied value investment strategies as its investment philosophy. The value approach to investing always considers the risk of an investment prior to evaluating the potential reward.

In over 32 years of evaluating securities, we have reviewed other approaches used by successful investors, including many presented in academic studies.  Our experience and research have led us to conclude that the value approach produces superior results.

Value investing is a disciplined approach to investment founded by the late Benjamin Graham, who is considered by many the father of security analysis.  Graham was a highly-respected professor of finance, as well as an investment manager.  As a practitioner, he produced superior performance results by implementing his value investment strategies.

It is no coincidence that most of today's successful investment managers have either been students of Benjamin Graham or are practitioners of his philosophy.  Below is an excerpt that summarizes the value investment approach.   This study was commissioned by the National Bureau of Economic Research and was conducted by a team of finance and economics professors from Harvard University, the University of  Illinois, and the University of Chicago.

"For many years stock market analysts have argued that value strategies outperform the market.  These value strategies call for buying stocks that have low prices relative to earnings, dividends, book, assets, or other measures of fundamental value. While there is some agreement that value strategies produce higher returns, the interpretation of why they do so is more controversial.  This paper provides evidence that value strategies yield higher returns because these strategies exploit the mistakes of the typical investor and not because these strategies are fundamentally riskier."

As your investment advisor, it is our goal to help you manage your investments successfully and avoid the mistakes of the typical investor. You can find out more about our investment approach in our principles section or among our answers to frequently asked questions. You may also want to take a look at the research tools we use in our rigorous company evaluation process.

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