Conifer Management

Greg Alexander

Greg Alexander is the founder and chief investment officer of Conifer Management, a New York firm he started in 2000. He came up at Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb — the firm Warren Buffett steered his own investors toward when he closed his partnership in 1969 — joining it in 1985. There he spent decades managing the firm's concentrated Acacia strategy, a portfolio of well-run, highly profitable businesses with durable competitive advantages bought at a margin of safety. He runs Conifer as a separate vehicle inside that Ruane Cunniff ecosystem, sharing support staff with the firm while preferring independent research over building a large team, and the firm registered with the SEC in June 2016. His approach is fundamental and bottom-up: he reads issuers' financial statements, judges management quality, competitive position, and market pricing, then builds a concentrated book of equity, debt, and other securities he intends to hold for years. When he thinks a company he owns is underperforming, he is willing to push for change, occasionally seeking board seats or a voice in the company's governance. The story worth retelling: in a 2010 lecture, Columbia Business School professor Bruce Greenwald told his value-investing class that Buffett had named the three investors he would trust to manage his own money — Seth Klarman, Li Lu, and Greg Alexander. It is a striking tribute for a manager who runs a deliberately small, unglamorous firm.