Olstein Capital Management

Robert Olstein

US-listed stocks across every Olstein account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Robert A. Olstein runs Olstein Capital Management, the forensic-accounting value firm he founded in 1995. He came to investing through accounting: he earned an MBA in Accounting and a BA in Mathematical Statistics from Michigan State University, worked early in his career at Arthur Andersen, and later served as a securities analyst in New York. In 1971 he and his partner Thornton O'Glove co-founded The Quality of Earnings Report, a publication credited with introducing forensic accounting to investing — it taught readers to read between the lines of financial statements and find the gap between reported earnings and a company's real cash generation. The work won him the Graham & Dodd Scroll Award from the Financial Analysts Federation (now the CFA Institute) in 1973. He then spent 1981 to 1995 as a senior portfolio manager at Smith Barney, applying his earnings-quality method to individual and institutional accounts before striking out on his own. Olstein treats a company's public financial statements as the only reliable source of truth. He builds a concentrated portfolio of profitable businesses and holds them for the long run, and he deliberately avoids direct contact with company management — preferring to judge executives strictly from their filings, footnotes, and disclosures. Rather than agitating for change, he buys companies that generate real free cash flow and need no fixing, and steers clear of those whose reported earnings outrun the cash they actually produce.