Oakmark Select Fund

Bill Nygren

Part of Harris Associates

These are Oakmark Select Fund's own holdings, not the firm's. Percentages are of the stock positions in its latest filing — the fund's cash and bonds are not included. This is a stock-picker's fund: a deliberately narrow basket of 20 to 30 mid- and large-cap U.S. companies that Bill Nygren judges to be the best value ideas on offer, concentrated in names run by management he trusts to put capital to work. Rather than spreading across the whole market, Nygren waits for quality businesses to fall temporarily out of favor, buys them at roughly 60% of what he thinks they are worth, and typically holds until the price climbs to around 90% of that estimate. It is a patient, long-horizon approach built on the margin of safety — a philosophy shared across Harris Associates, the Chicago firm that advises the Oakmark family, but here sharpened into a smaller, more focused set of holdings than the firm's flagship fund. The fund launched on November 1, 1996, with Nygren at the helm from day one, and its defining episode was a bet on a spin-off. In the early 1990s the market wrote off Liberty Media, a company carved out of cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., as a leveraged jumble of minority cable and programming stakes with no clean earnings. A sum-of-the-parts analysis told a different story: the pieces were worth far more than the share price implied, and the position grew many times over, becoming a recurring lesson in how Nygren handles corporate spin-offs. Nygren, a CFA charterholder who studied accounting at the University of Minnesota and finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent his whole career at Harris Associates, joining as an analyst in 1983 and running U.S. research before taking over this fund. He has managed the Oakmark Select Fund since its launch and the firm's flagship Oakmark Fund since 2000.

69%

based on 16 of 25 closed positions