William W. Ashby Lecture Series on Value Investing

About the Speaker Series

For years, Marilyn Ashby listened to her husband dissuade his clients from investing in popular stocks. “Everybody wanted their money in Nortel,” she remembers, “but Bill held firm and steered his clients in another direction. He felt Nortel was overvalued.” When the tech fall hit, his beliefs appeared to be confirmed. “That taught me to respect the market,” she says.

An alumna of Concordia University, she made a donation last year to the John Molson School of Business to establish a speaker series on value investing in William Ashby’s honour.

Value investing involves buying securities that the investor, after having conducted some manner of analysis, feels are underpriced. Early concepts associated with value investing are attributed to Benjamin Graham, who was a professor at the Columbia School of Business, where he taught Warren Buffet, and who is generally regarded to be the most successful investor of all time.

Ashby is a graduate of Sir George Williams University and spent most of his career working in securities research and portfolio management, serving several years as President of Beutel, Goodman and Company Ltd, the Toronto-based investment management firm.