Teledyne and Dr. Henry Singleton, Case Study in Capital Allocation

“[Warren Buffett] considers that Henry Singleton of Teledyne has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business.” – John Train’s The Money Masters

Below is a massive case study of Dr. Henry Singleton and Teledyne. The document states it was edited by John Chew from CSInvesting.org, a great blog to follow. All the credits goes to him. Not a lot of people have heard of Henry Singleton, a person that Buffets consider the best one the greatest capitalists and capital allocators of all-time. An investor who put money into Teledyne stock in 1966 achieved an annual return of 17.9 percent over 25 years, or a 53x return on invested capital vs. 6.7x for the S&P 500, 9.0x for GE and 7.1x for other comparable conglomerates. Here’s the document:

PDF: Dr.-Singleton-and-Teledyne-A-Study-of-an-Excellent-Capital-Allocator

To find out more about Dr. Henry Singleton, I did post this article last year: Henry Singleton Forbes 1979 Article

Dr. Singleton was also featured in The Outsiders by William N. Thorndike, among 7 other great investors. It’s one of the best investment book I’ve read and if you haven’t it should be on the top of the list.