Are value investors different from other investors? Is the person’s character and temperament the important differences? George Athanassakos Professor of finance and Ben Graham Chair in value investing at Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario has been looking into that idea.

James Montier an investing strategist and member of the asset allocation team at investment firm GMO, believes successful value investors are contrarian, patient, disciplined, unconstrained and skeptical. Warren Buffett has often said his successor must have the right temperament and a keen understanding of human psychology and institutional biases.

As many Professors do, Professor Athanassakos conducted research with two control groups, one he considered more value investor inclined and one that was considered more non-value investors.

What he found was in general there was no statistical differences in the average answers to most of the questions. However one area that was interesting was the magnitude of dispersion in the answers. The value investors tended to answer in a narrow range while the non value investors were more widely dispersed. This is keeping with what Mr. Buffett has said, you either get value investing right away or you do not. The research continues.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, with most things in life there are times when you are more agreeable to ideas than others. Sometimes you have to make mistakes and try to learn from them. In general, trying to buy low priced assets that should become higher priced assets will take time to learn. Some of the elements including taking your time to do your homework and not make a decision until you are more certain  than not. It often means you need to follow a variety of stocks to know when one is worth buying or not. In many ways it is going to the grocery store and looking for bargains, at what price is an item a bargain or not? At what point would you buy or wait? If you believe in cycles and most of us do, then waiting and being prepared will both make and save you money.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.