Dave Iben is the founder and CIO of Kopernik GlobalInvestors, a $6bn global value investment shop which prides itself on independent thought and is comfortable with contrarian positions.

Steve invited Dave on the podcast because at a recent NewYork conference, Dave was cheerleading that value was back, and Steve wanted to discuss the rationale for his enthusiasm, given value’s massive underperformance in the last 15 years. Luckily Dave was spending the summer in London looking for cheap UK stocks, and they could record in person.

Gary Channon is one of the UK’s better known valueinvestors. He runs a value fund, a closed-end fund and a private equity vehicle. He runs a highly concentrated portfolio. The top 5 positions are over 50%, and he holds no more than 15 stocks.

I asked him on the podcast because he is really thoughtful about his process – he only buys stocks selling for <50% of intrinsic value, and if he can monitor the business performance independently of the company's communications. He is then prepared to hold them for extended periods, as long as they remain cheap.

His framework for evaluating a stock includes parameterslike the depth of work completed and confidence levels, he has instructed his entire research team to become AI experts and he has already seen significant benefits; he thinks AI means sellside analysts will be more or less gone in twoyears; and we talked about his techniques for interviewing management which include spending 4-6 hours preparing for a 1 hour meeting.

Jennifer Wallace is a value investor. She learned her tradefrom a series of luminaries, studying under Bruce Greenwald at Columbia, before going to work for famed value investor Bob Bruce (who used to hang out with Warren Buffett).

Today she is the CIO of Summit Street Capital Management, and only invests in high quality companies with modest leverage when they are super cheap. This means she will often find stocks with issues that are hopefully temporary.

But she has found a winning formula, having delivered a 7.8x return to investors since 2009. Around a quarter of her investee companies have been acquired. She explains why, her rationale for having a 25-30 stock equally-weighted portfolio and why you should not befriend CEOs - "if you want a friend, get a dog”.