Harris Associates

Bill Nygren

US-listed stocks across every Harris Associates account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Bill Nygren is the chief investment officer for U.S. equities at Harris Associates, the Chicago firm that advises the Oakmark funds. He joined as an investment analyst in 1983, ran U.S. research from 1990 to 1998, and has managed the concentrated Oakmark Select Fund since 1996 and the flagship Oakmark Fund since 2000. He studied accounting at the University of Minnesota and finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before a career that has kept him at the same firm for four decades. Harris Associates was founded in 1976 by eight investment professionals — among them Ralph Wanger and the others — who had worked together in the private investment office of Chicago entrepreneur Irving Harris. The firm grew into one of the country's larger value shops, built around a single idea: buy good businesses at a meaningful discount to what they are worth, and hold until the market closes the gap. Nygren typically looks for stocks trading at about 60% of his estimate of intrinsic value, sells around 90%, and favors quality companies temporarily out of favor with managers who use capital well. His signature story is Liberty Media, a company spun out of cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. in the early 1990s. The market dismissed it as a leveraged jumble of minority cable and programming stakes with no clean earnings, but a sum-of-the-parts analysis showed the pieces were worth far more than the stock price implied — an investment that grew many times over and became a recurring lesson in his approach to corporate spin-offs.

≥55 qtrs

American International Group, Inc. · AIG