About Ridgewood Investments
Join our many longtime clients who trust Ridgewood to grow their wealth and guide them to financial security
Why Ridgewood Was Founded
Ridgewood is built on a deep sense of commitment to the success and welfare of our clients. Our goal for each of our clients is to increase their wealth to afford them financial freedom and flexibility.
Kaushal "Ken" Majmudar, CFA
Founder and Managing Partner
A Message From Our Founder
My parents emigrated to the United States from India with me and my little sister when I was 5 years old. Initially we settled in a small 1 bedroom apartment in Jersey City, NJ. From those humble beginnings, thanks to the educational and economic opportunities that this great country provided to me and my family, I have been blessed to work on Wall Street and eventually start my own firm to help others achieve the financial freedom and security that can come from wise investing and financial management.
In late 2002, I founded Ridgewood Investments to help others achieve the transformational results that I was able to achieve for myself and my own family using the principles of sound long-term investing that I had learned by studying what works and what doesn’t work. Our approach is based on the successful lessons taught by renowned value investors like Warren Buffett and many other great investors.
Ridgewood is committed to the success and welfare of our clients. We believe that each of our clients is a partner or a member of our extended family. Our goal for our clients is to intelligently protect and grow their savings to achieve financial freedom and security. Our approach is a turnkey, outsourced solution that allows you to hand over the time-consuming responsibilities of making difficult investment and financial decisions to a team of trustworthy experts who are watching out for your best interests.
The best way to determine whether our approach could help you transform your own results is to chat with us about your own unique situation. Our investment reviews are comprehensive and informative. Whether or not you decide to work with us, we guarantee that you will come away with some actionable ideas and strategies that you probably didn’t know about.
Our Team
Ridgewood Investments is a privately-owned owner-managed company. As a partnership of highly experienced professionals, our structure is aligned with our focus on delivering long-term results for our clients. Unlike firms that focus on quarterly results or need to show constantly growing earnings in the short-term, our firm is designed to take a long-term and sustainable view towards our investment strategies and our business performance.
Kaushal "Ken" Majmudar, CFA
Terrance P. McGuire
Sam Namiri
Valerie R. Lemmon, CFA
Dina Delmonico
Our Investment Philosophy
Our investment philosophy and approach draw upon our partners’ years of experience managing investments across numerous market environments on an institutional scale and models the successful philosophies, practices and insights of outstanding investors like Warren Buffett, Philip Fisher, Benjamin Graham, Bob Kirby, Peter Lynch and others.
One of our primary goals is to help our clients achieve outstanding long-term investment performance through the application of proven principles based on a sound and timeless investment philosophy.
"Traditional wisdom is long on tradition and short on wisdom"
Investing Must Be Business like and Requires Patience, Discipline and Hard Work
The key to successful long-term investing is to take a very “business like” approach to making capital commitments. Being business like means doing your own homework, working hard at your chosen field of activity, thinking for yourself, trying to identify proven methods, and understanding and focusing on the fundamentals that you can control. Successful investing must be seen as a serious endeavor worth pursuing and honing with intensity and consistency over time.
We Are Value Investors for Whom Price Paid is Important
At the core of our investment philosophy is a belief that a value-based and value-conscious approach to committing capital is a key prerequisite for long-term investment success. Even a great business can sometimes be a poor investment, if the price paid is too high. Correspondingly, we believe that some of the best investment opportunities are found in areas that are currently overlooked and thereby offer attractive prices and total return potential.
"Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years"
A Long-Term Approach and Emphasis on Patiently Compounding Capital Over Time
We emphasize and focus on the long-term results of our investments. We often think about investment time horizons in rolling five- to ten-year periods of time, though in practice longer or shorter periods will also arise. The reason we emphasize the long term is because we believe that worthwhile investment success is built over a long period of steady compounding and is rarely built overnight.
Understanding and Managing Risk Through Margin of Safety
In building our investment portfolios, we look to compound our investors’ and our own capital over time while working to mitigate unnecessary risk. By risk, we mean permanent loss of capital as contrasted with temporary stock market price fluctuations. In this orientation, we are also different than the majority of advisors and individuals. Although volatility is often equated with risk, we believe that volatility can also create opportunities for long-term investors. For example, we are happy to see an increase in intrinsic value accompanied by a short-term price drop in one of our investments, particularly when we can use the opportunity to build a position further.
"Most investment managers would produce better returns for their clients if they completely ignored current market price"
Limiting Our Investments to Our Circle of Competence
Part of having an edge is having a superior ability to understand and identify both opportunities and pitfalls associated with a given business. However, investing is a competitive activity and competition has a tendency to reduce the profitability of any edge over time. One important bedrock principle we emphasize is to limit our investments and activities to areas within the investment universe which we think we can understand, a concept referred to as sticking to our own circle of competence.
An Emphasis on People, Culture, Capital Allocation, and Great Businesses
We believe there is much more to investing than just the numbers associated with a given opportunity. In fact, historical numbers are only relevant to the extent that they foreshadow what is yet to come. At least as important is an understanding of the qualitative factors and policies that will create the future financial performance that will drive our investment results in the future. The qualitative factors include such things as the nature of the business and culture of the company, the quality and character of the people managing the business, and the capital allocation policies that they are likely to implement in the future.
Let's get in touch.
The best way to learn if our approach could help you transform your own results is to chat with us about your own unique situation. Our investment reviews are comprehensive and informative. Whether or not you decide to work with us, we guarantee that you will come away with some actionable ideas and strategies that you probably didn’t know about.