Sir Ron Brierley

"At that time, there were many examples of the market mispricing public companies, with share prices either too low or too high to be justified by the respective company’s value. It still happens today but it was more frequent in the eighties for a number of reasons. Identifying which stocks were mispriced was key to Sir Ron Brierley’s success. He and his team picked over the data of companies, looking for a mismatch between their real value and the price of their shares. ‘That’s been Ron Brierley’s modus operandi all his life,’ says Heatley. ‘I’m not as clever as him, and I’m not an analyst but some of those mismatched prices were obvious.’"

"In her book on Sir Ron Brierley, Yvonne van Dongen writes that Heatley’s suggestion of buying GM showed ‘it was obvious he was not BIL material’.[11](private://read/01jectdbce729daxqkxt7cbe8r/#mn16) Collins is kinder. ‘Craig’s thought processes had no real boundaries,’ he says. ‘He was not constrained by things the way we were. While we were huge by New Zealand standards, in a lot of ways we were very constrained and we tended to look at existing companies and not stray too far from the things that we knew, whereas Craig had not been around for that long and didn’t tend to see those boundaries. He looked at things quite differently.’"