Miller Value Partners

Bill Miller

William M. Miller III is an American investor who founded Miller Value Partners and ran it as chairman and chief investment officer. He studied economics at Washington and Lee University, did graduate work in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and joined Legg Mason in 1981 as a securities analyst, earning his CFA designation in 1986 before rising to run the firm's capital management unit. Miller started Miller Value Partners in 2016, buying out Legg Mason's stake in the investment business he had built there. He calls himself a value investor with an unconventional twist: any stock can be a value stock, he says, if it trades at a discount to its intrinsic worth, so he deliberately blends high- and low-price-to-earnings names to diversify. He holds businesses for years and looks for companies whose long-run earning power the market has underpriced. That is how he came to buy Amazon in early 1997, when most analysts dismissed the stock as an overvalued novelty. The story that made his name came earlier, when the Legg Mason Value Trust he ran beat the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years, from 1991 through 2005, a feat statisticians put at roughly one chance in 2.3 million. The streak collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis, when Miller lost more than $100 million on Bear Stearns and suffered heavy drawdowns. He has since plowed money into Bitcoin and other contrarian positions.