Torray Investment Partners

Torray

US-listed stocks across every Torray account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Robert Torray founded Torray Investment Partners in 1972, but he did not come to investing through a finance pedigree. A 1959 Duke graduate who served as student body president, he spent a year and a half in law school before finding his way to Wall Street, starting as a stockbroker at Alex. Brown & Sons in Baltimore in 1962 and later moving to New York and the firm Blyth Eastman Dillon. There he met David Clark, and in 1972 the two struck out on their own, walking out the door with five pension fund clients and setting up what began as Torray Clark & Co. in Bethesda, Maryland. Torray's approach was built on a plain idea he often repeated: a common stock is a partial interest in a business, not a slip of paper to be traded. He favored a few dozen large, shareholder-friendly companies with steady earnings and conservative balance sheets, and he held them for many years, letting compounding do the work and steering clear of cyclical and commodity businesses. The firm stayed independent and staff-owned, and its founder described the job as a matter of common sense and patience rather than market forecasting. Torray died in May 2021, but the firm he built, run today by investors including Shawn Hendon and Jeffrey Lent, still keeps his long-horizon, concentrated style. It grew from those first five pension accounts into one of the region's best-known value shops, a boutique that kept betting on good businesses and refusing to trade them for years at a time.