Jean-Marie Eveillard’s Value Investing Makes Sense offers a lucid, firsthand account of a legendary global value practitioner whose disciplined approach generated substantial long-term outperformance at First Eagle by focusing on margin of safety, hidden assets, and high-quality businesses at attractive prices. Eveillard provides rare insight into his contrarian toolkit - including prescient gold exposure, sum-of-the-parts opportunities such as the Bank for International Settlements, and the nuanced art of selling - while candidly reflecting on both successes (long-term holdings like Lindt) and errors (exiting compounders like Richemont too early).Most powerfully, the book recounts the severe test of the late 1990s technology bubble, when refusal to chase overvalued growth stocks produced significant relative underperformance (the flagship fund rose just 29% from early 1997through 1999 while the S&P 500 more than doubled) and sharp asset contraction as AUM fell from over $6 billion to around $2 billion amid widespread redemptions; Eveillard’s famous declaration that he would “rather lose half our shareholders than half our shareholders’ money” exemplifies the intellectual honesty and temperament required to prioritize client capital preservation over short-term asset gathering or style drift.
For institutional allocators and value investors navigating today’s similarly euphoric, concentrated markets - where narrow leadership in high-valuation technology and semiconductor names creates parallel pressures - this concise masterclass reinforces why steadfast adherence to first principles, even when painful, ultimately protects capital and positions portfolios for outsized recovery and growth when the cycle turns, as First Eagle’s own experience demonstrated when assets expanded dramatically in subsequent years. It is essential reading for any practitioner seeking to internalize the courage and patience that separate durable value processes from those that bend under market fashion.
