Ann: QBE UPDATES THE MARKET ON FY17 RESULTS EXPECTATIONS, page-37

"I am talking about blue chip stocks here not some piddly little stock owned by the owners and their cronies."

Just because a stock is described as "blue chip", doesn't make it so.

As for "piddly little stocks", when it comes to looking for shareholder value creation, one can be quite agnostic to the size of the company in which one invests.

If it is a durable business, with a wide commercial moat that results in superior returns on the capital it deploys, and it is run by people - even if they own most of the stock [*] - who are honest, competent and prudent with the company's capital, then it is highly likely to be a business that creates value for its shareholders.

I can show you very small companies that fit this bill, and I can show you medium-sized companies that do so too, as well as companies with very large market capitalisation.

[*] Overwhelmingly, investing in companies where the managers are also significant owners of the issued capital of the business, is highly correlated with superior shareholder value creation, due to the alingment of the interests of those companies' managers with their owners


"Compare the mainstream indexes here with the rest of the world not just the US."

Again, who says we need to invest in arbitrary technical constructs such as mainstream indices?