Mairs & Power

Mairs & Power

US-listed stocks across every Mairs & Power account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. George A. Mairs Jr. founded the St. Paul firm in 1931, at age 28, in the depths of the Great Depression and barely more than a year after the 1929 stock crash. A St. Paul native, he started the firm after selling the family business, and he set the patient, disciplined approach the firm still follows. For its first seventy-five years the firm was led by three Georges: the founder, his son George Mairs III, and George Power Jr., who joined as a partner in the mid-1950s and gave the firm the name it carries today. George Mairs III was the family's stock-picker, a buy-and-hold investor who launched the firm's flagship Growth Fund in 1958, among the first hundred mutual funds in the country. The firm's whole approach grows straight out of that founding: it concentrates on Upper Midwest companies it can reach from Minnesota, holds them for a decade or two, and trades rarely, with portfolio turnover historically below ten percent a year. It looks for quality businesses with durable advantages and strong returns on invested capital, run by careful managers, and while it is an active owner it does not push companies to change. Mairs & Power remains independent and employee-owned, still run from the same Minnesota corner where it began.

based on 263 of 482 closed positions