The Longleaf Partners Fund LLPFX will close to new investors 6/9/17. The Longleaf team are having a hard time finding new qualified investments and have 25% in cash.
Longleaf Partners is managed by Southeastern Asset Management, the team described as a sort of ideal in active management by David Swenson in the book Unconventional Success. They invest in their own funds, are shareholder oriented, communicate well and run a concentrated value portfolio. And they have seriously underperformed. They lag the S&P500 over 3, 5, 10 and 15 years, and beat it slightly over 20.
Interesting (to me), the fund has been open since 1/18/2008, when they re-opened “temporarily”, seeing opportunities for $1.5B. The fund had net assets then of $11.2B. Net assets as of last quarter end were $3.4B. That’s a lot of redemptions.
Some comments from Longleaf on today’s conference call:
- Not yet classify the US market as a bubble. Valuations are stretched. Growing signs of speculation with passive and momentum.
- Longleaf are confident they will outperform the market over next 3-5 years with lower risk.
- International more compelling, Asia more so than Europe.
For what it's worth.