Recently, Morningstar interviewed Amit Wadhwaney at Third Avenue Management (TAM) and Wadhwaney discussed one of his Canadian holding - Viterra. This interview piqued my interest in Viterra, and I spent some time digging through the annual reports of Viterra and Wadhwaney’s letters to shareholders to understand his investment thesis. Upon investigation, I found that Viterra fits TAM’s “safe and cheap” investing framework perfectly. In this case study (it is much longer than most articles on this website, but it is a case-study), I want to use TAM’s investment in Viterra to show how safe and cheap investing works and highlight how it differs from other value investing methodologies.

Let’s begin with understanding the elements of a "safe and cheap" investment:

* High quality balance sheet.

* Competent and shareholder-oriented management.

* Understandable and honest disclosure documents.

* Priced at a significant discount from realizable net asset value.

We will come back to these elements of safe and cheap investing as applicable to Viterra, but first let’s understand some key events that took place before TAM invested in Viterra.................

Full Story: http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=97742