Giverny Capital

Francois Rochon

François Rochon is a Canadian investor who founded Giverny Capital, a Montreal firm, in December 1998. He came to money management by an unusual route: trained as an engineer at École Polytechnique of Montreal with a Master's in Science, he spent his early career as a researcher and network engineer at INRS-Telecom and Teleglobe Canada. While working as an engineer he taught himself investing by reading Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch and Philip Fisher. He started managing family accounts in 1993, then joined Montrusco & Associates as an analyst and rose to portfolio manager overseeing U.S. accounts. Rochon built Giverny around long-term ownership of what he calls outstanding companies — businesses with durable competitive advantages, skilled and passionate management with real stakes in what they run, and growth that can compound for years. He holds a concentrated portfolio and, like Buffett, treats a stock as a fractional stake in a business rather than a trading ticket, keeping his mistakes du jour — the errors in his own letters — as a standing lesson. The firm's name carries the story. On a trip to France in 1990, shortly after finishing his engineering degree, Rochon visited the gardens at Giverny, the village where Claude Monet painted his water lilies for over four decades. The visit left such an impression that he named his firm for it, treating investing as its own quiet craft. His career is the subject of a chapter in Andy Kilpatrick's "Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett."