Dodge & Cox

Dodge & Cox

US-listed stocks across every Dodge & Cox account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Dodge & Cox is run by no one in particular — and that is exactly the point. The San Francisco firm, founded in 1930 by Van Duyn Dodge and E. Morris Cox during the depths of the Great Depression, has never had a star portfolio manager. Cox, a UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School graduate, and Dodge, a World War I veteran, built the company around a committee in which every decision is debated and pressure-tested by analysts who are themselves the firm's owners; the shop remains 100% employee-owned. The whole process rests on deep, bottom-up research held to a three-to-five-year view. The founders' era shaped the philosophy. Dodge and Cox started the firm to bring a measure of order to what they saw as a chaotic, conflict-ridden investment world, and it has stayed contrarian ever since. It looks for strong businesses with sound long-term prospects whose shares have been beaten down by temporary setbacks, holds them for years, keeps turnover low, and charges famously low fees. There is no sales force and no advertising; the firm relies on its long record alone. That patience produced the story most worth retelling. Dodge & Cox sailed through the late-1990s dot-com bubble by refusing to chase overvalued internet stocks, earning a reputation as a safe harbor — only to be caught badly in 2008, when its large financial-sector holdings dragged its funds down further than the broader market. Even so, index-fund pioneer John C. Bogle, a lifelong skeptic of active management, cited the firm as one of the few active managers he would recommend, praising it for being "in the business of investment management, and not in the business of marketing."