Tweedy, Browne Company

Tweedy Browne

US-listed stocks across every Tweedy, Browne account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Tweedy, Browne is run by four long-serving managing directors — William H. Browne, Thomas H. Shrager, John D. Spears, and Robert Q. Wyckoff Jr. — value investors in the mold Benjamin Graham built. Browne joined the Stamford, Connecticut firm in 1978; today the four co-lead the firm through committees rather than a single star, while Affiliated Managers Group has held a majority stake since 1997. The firm began in 1920, when Forrest Birchard "Bill" Tweedy opened a brokerage for closely held, inactively traded securities that bigger Wall Street firms ignored. Tweedy, Browne became the "buyer of last resort" for such small, obscure stocks — companies held by only a few dozen shareholders — and that niche caught the attention of Benjamin Graham, whose Graham-Newman Corp. traded through the firm. A young Warren Buffett used Tweedy, Browne as his preferred brokerage for Buffett Partnership from 1956 to 1966 and bought his first Berkshire Hathaway shares through it. In 1984 Buffett named the firm's partners among "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville," crediting them with beating both the Dow and the S&P 500 from 1966 to 1982. The firm still invests Graham's way: it screens for stocks selling below book value and at low earnings and cash-flow multiples, holds them for years, and does not press companies to change. Its portfolios spread across many names rather than a handful, and when it invests abroad it hedges foreign currency back toward the dollar on the reasoning that it can appraise balance sheets better than exchange rates. The firm opened its first mutual fund to the public in 1993.