Davis Advisors

Christopher Davis

US-listed stocks across every Davis account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Christopher Davis runs Davis Advisors, the third generation of his family to manage money. He joined the firm in 1989 as a financial analyst, became portfolio manager in 1995 on his father's retirement, and took the helm of a firm whose investing habits were set long before he arrived. His schooling, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, came after a stint as a research analyst at Tanaka Capital Management and an earlier job as an accountant at State Street Bank and Trust. Today he also sits on the boards of the Coca-Cola Company and Graham Holdings Company. The firm traces to 1969, but the family's approach began two decades earlier, with his grandfather Shelby Cullom Davis. In 1947, at 38, Shelby left his post as First Deputy Superintendent of Insurance for New York, took $50,000 that his wife provided, and started buying the insurance companies he knew best — shares that often traded below book value. He treated the money as a lifetime compounding project, and by the time he was done it had grown to roughly $900 million. Davis Advisors still leans on that playbook: value-priced, durable businesses with strong managers, held for years rather than traded, in portfolios concentrated in a relative handful of names with a long-standing tilt toward financials. The family even has a name for the engine of that compounding, the "Davis Double Play" — the idea that an investor profits twice, first as a company's earnings grow and again as the market pays a higher price for each dollar of those earnings. It is the same discipline Christopher Davis inherited: buy a good business cheap, let it work, and give it decades to do so.

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