Brits Jeremy Utton, left, and Keith Ashworth-Lord, right, pose with Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
Warren Watch: Name brand
It’s irritating when someone capitalizes on your name.
So Warren Buffett wasn’t happy when a British investment manager touted a Buffett “meeting” that happened 13 years ago while discussing a new investment fund.
Or when the fund’s name includes the term “Buffettology,” the title of a book written by an ex-daughter-in-law who also has benefited from the family name.
Last week’s Warren Watch told about the investment fund, named Premier Sanford DeLand UK Buffettology, managed by Keith Ashworth-Lord.
Ashworth-Lord said he had met privately with Buffett a couple of times and intends, through the fund, to replicate Buffett’s investment strategy in the United Kingdom.
The “Buffettology” part of the title was licensed through Mary Buffett, ex-wife of Warren Buffett’s son Peter. She wrote a book with that title and has trademarked the word.
At first Ashworth-Lord’s name escaped recognition at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s offices in Omaha, but it eventually turned up on a list of people with press credentials for the 1998 and 1999 annual shareholders meetings. At the time, he and a fellow Brit, Jeremy Utton, wrote a monthly investment newsletter called Analyst PLC.
Ashworth-Lord wrote articles in the newsletter after the two shareholder meetings. The first year, he said, he and Utton went to a press conference held for reporters and afterward met separately with Buffett and Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. The 1998 article describes comments by Buffett and Munger during their separate meetings and includes a group picture of the four men.
The second year, Utton asked a question during the press conference, and then he and Ashworth-Lord were able to “mull around” and exchange some words with Buffett, Ashworth-Lord said in an email last week. That was the second “meeting.”
“Both of us remember the first occasion in particular as one where we got to chat about the common sense of business perspective investing,” Ashworth-Lord emailed last week. “We had just set out along this philosophical road and took great encouragement from Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger.” Ashworth-Lord and Utton no longer work together.
Buffett assistant Debbie Bosanek said Buffett agreed to an interview in 1998 with Utton as a journalist, and Ashworth-Lord was there, too.
But Buffett does not meet privately with investment managers or others to discuss investing philosophy or ideas, Bosanek said. Investors are misled if they think a certain fund manager or financial adviser has a special pipeline to Buffett, she said, because nobody does.
Berkshire’s files show that in August 2008, Utter proposed holding a “UK Warren Buffett Forum,” but Buffett responded that he wouldn’t participate and warned about confusion in the use of his name. “I’m afraid anything that involves my name in the way you suggest would lead to the inference that I have ‘blessed’ the activities and commentary,” Buffett wrote at the time.
He suggested a name like “a wide-ranging discussion of the Graham-Buffett-Munger investment philosophy” and said he hoped Utton and “your partner” — apparently Ashworth-Lord — could attend the next Berkshire meeting.
Attaching Buffett’s name or a variation of it to an investment fund could seem misleading, too. But there’s little one can do about seeing one’s name in an unwanted place if one has become famous on a Buffett scale.
Although Buffett and Bosanek did not mention it, the new fund’s connection to Mary Buffett also raises flags because, according to Warren Buffett’s biographers, he severed ties with her after an acrimonious divorce from Peter.
Books she has co-written since then: “Buffettology,” “The Buffettology Workbook,” “The New Buffettology,” “Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets,” “Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements,” “Warren Buffett and the Art of Stock Arbitrage” and “The Tao of Warren Buffett.”
Mary Buffett, by the way, wasn’t happy with Warren Watch cheekily saying that Ashworth-Lord’s new fund had been “cooked up.”
“We didn’t cook it up,” she said from San Francisco. “We thought about it long and hard.”
She and her co-author, David Clark of Omaha, are advisers to the fund and have an eighth book coming out, tentatively titled, “Warren Buffett’s Portfolio.”
Aiding women, girls
Last week Jennifer Buffett, Peter’s wife, was the keynote speaker at the “Power of the Purse” fundraising luncheon sponsored by the Women for Women giving circle in Asheville, N.C., the Citizen-Times newspaper said.
When Warren Buffett pledged to give away his fortune, including sizable grants to foundations headed by his three children, Jennifer Buffett said she heeded his advice to find causes that were “underinvested but ripe with opportunity.”
As president of her family’s NoVo Foundation, she found a “painfully undervalued asset”: women and girls.
“When you invest in girls and women, whether it’s in the developing world or here in North Carolina, everyone benefits,” she told an audience of more than 900.
Violence against women is society’s definitive problem, she said, and not involving half of the world’s population is “why we are in the mess we are,” she told the newspaper. “They (women) are part of the solution.”
“One in three girls and one in three women will be the victim of some sort of assault in their lifetime,” she said. “That is beyond any kind of health epidemic. We need to look into this, and we are not. Something is happening in society, and violence is a symptom.
“What we need is for people to start waking up. We need a consciousness shift, and it’s not just for money to solve the problem.”
Women for Women has given $1.5 million in grants since 2006 for programs promoting self-sufficiency for women.
Bank repayment
M&T Bank of Buffalo, N.Y., of which Berkshire is a large shareholder, has repaid more than $700 million to the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Baltimore Sun reported.
The U.S. Treasury now holds $381.5 million in preferred shares of M&T Bank Corp., the story said.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1080, steve.jordon@owh.com
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