Mohnish Pabrai is a successful US investor and author. In the early days of his fund, he sat down with investors and told them that he’s going to focus on the investing and that they’re going to be his marketing team. A cocky declaration, sure, but also a task every fund manager would dearly like to outsource so that they can focus on investing.
As you’d know, we’d like for both the Forager Australian Shares Fund and Forager International Shares Fund to get a bit bigger—to where there’s a sensible trade-off between economies of scale on costs for the business and prospective returns for our clients.
But, as Steve Johnson has highlighted on numerous occasions, most recently in the video An introduction to Forager, we’re not going to change our spots to appeal to the investing masses. Our funds are only suitable for investors prepared to take the long term view (5 years), that have the stomach for periods of underperformance which will stem from being both contrarian and human (in return, we promise to learn from and forthrightly report investing errors to you), and that share a passion for the sort of unloved bargains both funds target.
In other words, we’d like to meet more people just like you.
Your past word of mouth efforts have helped us tremendously. Without wanting to stretch the friendship for which we’re immensely thankful, we could use an extra boost over the next few months. With the shift to the name Forager Funds, we’ve given up the name-association with Intelligent Investor. Potential customers think we’re newborns, and that modern arbiter of importance—search engines like Google—aren’t sure we even existed before 1 July 2014.
Here are a few ways you can help Forager get established:
- If you use Twitter, please follow @ForagerFunds
- Facebook users, please ‘like’ us at ?? [FB account needs to be renamed??]
- If there are any Bristlemouth blog posts, tweets or media interviews that you enjoyed or think others might find useful, please share them with likeminded investors. Email your friend or, better yet, share via Facebook or Twitter. This alerts potentially suitable investors to our existence and also builds the company's Google search history. The recent AFR article 5 of the best young stock pickers profiles Steve and four other very capable fund managers. Look past the photography and pliable definition of ‘young’. We’ll keep writing posts and doing interviews that current and potential investors might find useful, please pass them on if you find them so.
- Share any monthly or quarterly letters you found useful (here’s the latest Forager Funds June quarterly). Written chiefly for existing investors, these letter are also a way for potential investor to gauge whether either fund might be a good fit for their portfolios.
We’re in your debt for the kind word of mouth offered over the past years, this business wouldn’t be successful without it. Please keep it up. We’re now going back to looking for cheap stocks and will leave the marketing mainly in your capable hands. Thank you!