Third Avenue Management

Third Avenue

US-listed stocks across every Third Avenue account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Martin J. Whitman came to value investing the long way around. A Navy veteran who graduated from Syracuse in 1949, he started as a security analyst at Shearson Hammill before joining the family office of William Rosenwald, son of a Sears, Roebuck founder, where he learned investment banking and a hard risk aversion while stewarding another family's money. In 1974 he struck out on his own, founding the M.J. Whitman broker-dealer, and it was from that base that he built Third Avenue Management in New York in 1986 — at age 61, with most of a career already behind him. Whitman's method, which he called "safe and cheap," turned the analyst's gaze from earnings forecasts to the balance sheet itself. He looked for creditworthy, low-debt companies whose assets were worth far more than the price being asked, buying at a substantial discount to net asset value and often holding for years. He was also a longtime teacher, spending more than three decades as a fellow and adjunct at the Yale School of Management, and wrote alongside Martin Shubik the classic "The Aggressive Conservative Investor." Whitman ran the firm's flagship Third Avenue Value Fund from its 1990 launch until 2012, remaining a figure of what patient, conservative security selection could be until his death in 2018 at 93. The firm he built carries on the same contrarian, asset-based discipline under its current leadership.