Pzena Investment Management

Richard Pzena

Richard Pzena is the founder and chairman of Pzena Investment Management, a New York deep-value firm he established in 1995. A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent five years in financial and planning roles at Amoco before joining Sanford C. Bernstein & Company in 1986 as an oil industry analyst. There he earned a place on the Institutional Investor All-America Research Team for three consecutive years and rose to become Director of U.S. Equity Investments and Chief Research Officer before striking out on his own. Pzena's approach is plainspoken: buy good businesses at bargain prices. He looks for companies whose earnings sit well below their long-term, normalized power—quality firms temporarily out of favor—and holds them patiently while waiting for the market to recognize the improvement, a stance that demands contrarian thinking. The firm went public on the NYSE in 2007 and returned to private ownership in October 2022, bought back by its own partners. In 2023 Caroline Cai, who joined the firm in 2004, succeeded Pzena as chief executive, though he remains chairman and co-chief investment officer.