Ardal Loh-Gronager on His Book, The Perceptive Investor

We had the pleasure of speaking with Ardal Loh-Gronager, founder and managing partner at Loh-Gronager Partners, based in London, England.

Ardal shares key insights into the philosophy behind his book, The Perceptive Investor: The Art, Science, and Temperament of Successful Value Investing, and the investment approach that underpins his work at Loh-Gronager Partners. Drawing from a formative upbringing marked by entrepreneurial parents and a career spanning both the buy and sell side of finance, Ardal reflects on how personal experience, intellectual curiosity, and humility shape his investing framework.

Ardal emphasizes that investing is far more than a numbers game. While he acknowledges the importance of rigorous quantitative analysis, he stresses that real differentiation comes from perception — being able to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different. He illustrates this idea through René Magritte’s painting “La Clairvoyance”, where the artist looks at an egg but paints a bird in flight. For Ardal, this metaphor captures the essence of perceptive investing: projecting future possibilities from incomplete present data.

The conversation also delves into the behavioral dimension of investing. Ardal explains how he and his team combat cognitive and emotional biases by using an extensive 250-question checklist, beginning with a centering exercise that records his emotional state before analysis. He draws on insights from psychology, behavioral finance, and past mistakes — both his own and those of other investors — to refine decision-making processes. The checklist is not about perfection, he notes, but about systematically flagging red flags and slowing down the decision cycle to avoid shortcuts that lead to errors.

Another central theme is humility. Ardal highlights the dangers of overconfidence, citing examples from Warren Buffett’s reflections to Lee Freeman-Shor’s “Best Ideas” fund experiment. He argues that long-term success is less about always being right and more about structuring portfolios to ensure that when you are right, the gains outweigh the inevitable losses. This thinking translates into Loh-Gronager Partners’ disciplined portfolio construction, which balances conviction with diversification, while maintaining a watchlist of smaller positions to avoid errors of omission.

The interview further explores how Ardal sources and evaluates investments, the lessons he has learned from mistakes, and the contrarian mindset that drives him toward areas of the market others shun — such as his deep dive into China when prevailing sentiment labeled it “un-investable.” He ties these lessons back to the interplay of art, science, and temperament, underscoring why temperament may ultimately be the most decisive factor in compounding wealth.

Overview:

• Entrepreneurship and the roots of an investor’s mindset
• Why perception separates successful investors from the rest
• The art, science, and temperament of investing
• Building and using a 250-question investment checklist
• Counteracting cognitive and behavioral biases
• The role of humility in portfolio construction
• Lessons from past investments and errors of omission
• Contrarian thinking: Insights from investing in China
• Case study: Credit Acceptance and the “win-win-win” test
• Learning from mistakes: Red flags and risk management
• Why financial literacy matters and supporting FT FLIC

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About the interviewee:

Ardal Loh-Gronager founded Loh-Gronager Partners as an Investment Partnership in 2021. He is the Managing Partner, responsible for all investment decisions and runs its Global Fund.

Ardal is half Danish, born in the United Kingdom, and was educated across Europe, Asia and Australia, giving him unique exposure to different peoples, cultures and values from a formative age. He attended Durham University in the UK, receiving the Queens Campus Scholarship and graduating with a BA (Hons) in Accounting & Finance.

He has always been entrepreneurial and business-minded having established and run several successful ventures. He fully endorses Warren Buffett’s belief that “I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am no investor”.

His passion for finance was sparked when researching ways to grow his steadily accumulating savings from his business ventures. He discovered the seminal work of Value Investing, Securities Analysis by Benjamin Graham & David Dodd, followed by the teachings of Phil Fisher, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, which were used to develop his own ‘latticework of mental models’ about investing.

Ardal has over 10 years’ financial industry experience with both buy-side and sell-side expertise. His career in finance began with internships in Sales & Trading at Goldman Sachs and Swiss Re Asset Management. He subsequently joined Morgan Stanley as an Interest Rates Trader, followed by Credit Suisse as a Credit Trader, before departing to manage an investment portfolio for himself and a small group of family & friends. Ardal decided to formalise the Partnership by forming Loh-Gronager Partners after several successful years, at the request of his investors and to manage external capital.

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