Walter Schloss
About
Walter Schloss was a Benjamin Graham disciple who ran his own partnership for more than four decades out of a tiny office, without analysts and without visiting the companies he owned.
His method was radically simple: read the financial statements, buy stocks trading well below tangible book value, hold a lot of them, and wait.
Warren Buffett celebrated Schloss in his famous 1984 essay "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" as living proof that Graham-style value investing wasn't luck — it was a repeatable process that quietly beat the market over decades.
- Buy stocks the way you'd buy groceries — cheap, and by the pound.
- Diversify. If you own many cheap things, you don't need to be right on every one.
- Ignore the noise. Read the 10-K, buy the balance sheet, wait for the market to notice.
From the record
Historical positions — for education, not a current portfolio.
- No celebrity picks — Schloss's edge was a rotating basket of dozens of statistically cheap, out-of-favor industrial stocks bought below tangible book value.
Read Walter in their own words
The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville
Buffett's famous essay that features Schloss as living proof Graham-style value investing is a repeatable edge — not luck.
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Schloss showed that Graham's method wasn't luck or genius — it was a repeatable process that a small, disciplined operator could run for four decades and quietly beat the market.