First Eagle Investment Management

First Eagle

US-listed stocks across every First Eagle account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. First Eagle Investment Management is a New York-based investment firm whose roots reach back to 1864, when the Arnhold family opened a bank in Dresden, Germany, financing local businesses such as breweries. That bank eventually merged with the Berlin house of S. Bleichröder, and the firm later adopted the name "First Eagle" in honor of Adler, a Swiss bank it had acquired along the way. It has been run since 1999 by the Global Value team it gained when it bought Société Générale Asset Management and took over the fund then known as the SocGen International Fund; the firm took its current name in 2009. The team today is led by Matthew McLennan, who grew up in Australia, started at Queensland Investment Corporation in 1991, and spent years at Goldman Sachs before joining First Eagle in 2008, working alongside Kimball Brooker. Their approach descends from Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett: they buy good businesses with a margin of safety, hold them for long stretches rather than trading, and rarely push companies to change. What sets the firm apart is its willingness to sit in cash and gold — held as deferred purchasing power — when nothing on the shelf looks cheap. The man who defined the house style is Jean-Marie Eveillard, who managed the flagship Global Fund for more than three decades before retiring from active management in 2009. A disciple of Graham, Eveillard made his name by treating the permanent loss of capital as the only risk that matters, a conviction that carried the fund through the market panic of the early 2000s while others were losing money.