Walter Schloss

Walter Schloss never attended college and began his career as a runner on Wall Street before studying under Benjamin Graham at the New York Stock Exchange Institute. He worked at Graham-Newman Corporation from 1946 to 1955, learning directly from Graham himself. In 1955 he founded his own investment partnership with $100,000 in capital, which he ran with his son Edwin Schloss until closing it in 2003. From 1955 to 2002 — 48 years — Schloss generated a remarkable track record of approximately 16% annualised returns, compared to approximately 10% for the S&P 500. He accomplished this with extraordinary simplicity: no Bloomberg terminal, no computer model, no MBA employees, and no Wall Street office — he worked from a single room with paper financial statements. His strategy was purely Grahamian: buy stocks trading significantly below book value, preferably with no debt, and wait patiently for them to revert toward intrinsic value. He owned hundreds of positions simultaneously, diversifying against the risk of any single position. Warren Buffett prominently named Schloss in his famous 1984 essay "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" as evidence that value investing produced consistent excess returns. Schloss passed away in 2012 at age 95. His career is perhaps the most compelling evidence that simple, disciplined fundamental investing can generate consistent long-term outperformance over half a century.