There's Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach

What this book actually teaches

There's Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach (2011) by Christopher Risso-Gill is a biography and investment study of Peter Cundill, the Canadian value investor who managed the Cundill Value Fund from 1975 to 2011 and produced one of the longest documented track records in global value investing — approximately 15% compound annual returns over more than three decades, drawing on Benjamin Graham's deep value methodology applied internationally. The book draws on Cundill's personal journals to provide both a biographical account and an exposition of his investment process.

The title captures Cundill's core conviction: markets always contain securities trading below intrinsic value, usually because they are obscure, temporarily distressed, or in unfashionable markets or sectors. The investor's job is not to forecast macro conditions or identify exciting growth businesses but to find these mispriced securities, buy them with a margin of safety, and wait for value to surface. Cundill was an early and persistent practitioner of international value investing at a time when most institutional investors focused exclusively on North American equities, and his willingness to invest in Japan, Hong Kong, and emerging markets when they were deeply out of favor was a significant source of his returns.

Risso-Gill uses Cundill's journals extensively to illustrate his process. The journal entries reveal how Cundill evaluated individual securities — typically looking for stocks trading below net asset value, net-nets in Graham's terminology, with honest management and some catalyst for value realization — and how he thought about portfolio construction, position sizing, and the behavioral discipline required to hold undervalued securities through extended periods of market indifference or further decline.

The book is particularly effective on the psychological discipline of deep value investing. Cundill regularly bought stocks that continued to fall after he purchased them, and his journals document the specific reasoning he used to distinguish between positions where the investment thesis was intact (buy more) and positions where new information suggested the thesis was broken (sell). The distinction is not formula-driven — it requires judgment about what has changed — and Cundill's documented decision-making process on this question is one of the most instructive elements of the book.

The weaknesses are about depth and selectivity. Because the book draws on Cundill's journals rather than systematic analysis of his full portfolio and returns, readers get the investments he wrote about — which skew toward interesting situations rather than the routine positions — rather than a comprehensive picture of the full strategy. The biographical chapters on Cundill's personal life and travels are engaging but crowd out some investment content that practitioners would find more valuable.

For value investors who want an intimate and documented account of how one of the discipline's most accomplished practitioners thought about individual securities and managed the behavioral challenges of deep value investing, There's Always Something to Do is among the most instructive primary-source accounts available in the genre.

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About Christopher Risso Gill

Read more from Christopher Risso Gill and explore the full bibliography on ClearValue Books.