Sequoia Fund

Sequoia Fund management team

The Sequoia Fund is the creation of William J. Ruane, a value investor who met Warren Buffett in 1950 in Benjamin Graham's investing seminar at Columbia University. The two became lifelong friends, and when Buffett dissolved his investment partnership in 1969 because he could no longer find bargains in an overheated market, he told his clients that the one person he trusted with their money was Ruane. Ruane and his partner Richard T. Cunniff launched the Sequoia Fund on July 15, 1970, as a home for those investors, and Robert Goldfarb joined the firm a year later. The advisory firm was renamed Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb in Goldfarb's honor in 2004. The firm has always practiced a concentrated, long-term version of the Graham-and-Doddsville value approach it learned from Graham and Buffett: it looks for high-quality businesses trading at attractive prices, does its own primary research, and holds them for years. It runs a deliberately non-diversified portfolio, holding far fewer stocks than a conventional mutual fund, on the logic that its best ideas deserve the most money. Over the decades the fund built one of Wall Street's best long-term records, though it has also known stretches of underperformance, and the firm has passed through several generations of portfolio managers while holding to the philosophy its founders set at the start.