Giverny Capital Asset Management

Giverny Capital Asset Management

Giverny Capital launched in Montreal in 1998 as the investment vehicle for François Rochon, who had spent the prior five years managing his own capital and writing a financial column. The firm's name references Claude Monet's gardens at Giverny, signaling a deliberate search for beauty and enduring value in businesses. Rochon explicitly modeled the firm's structure on the original Buffett Partnership, charging a performance fee only on returns above a 6% annual hurdle, with Rochon himself keeping the majority of his liquid net worth invested alongside clients. The firm runs a concentrated equity portfolio typically holding 18 to 25 positions across multiple geographies, primarily in North America but with occasional European and Asian exposure. Asset-class activity spans large-cap equities, smaller-cap listed companies, and the occasional special situation. Confirmed positions over time have included Berkshire Hathaway, Markel Group, and Alphabet (per public record), alongside Canadian holdings like Constellation Software and Metro. Rochon targets durable competitive advantages, high returns on capital, and management teams he considers exceptional operators. The firm does not short, does not use meaningful leverage, and trades infrequently — portfolio turnover often sits in the single digits annually. Giverny operates from Montreal with a lean team built around Rochon as the sole portfolio manager. Specific professional headcount and total assets are not publicly disclosed in a regularly updated form, though the firm's long-running partnership structure and compounded performance suggest a capital base material enough to support a multi-generational investment operation. Giverny also publishes an annual letter modeled on Buffett's shareholder letters, chronicling performance, mistakes, and qualitative appraisals of portfolio companies. In January 2024, the firm released its annual letter detailing a 14.4% return for 2023 and reflecting on a quarter-century of compounding since inception (per the firm's official communications, January 2024). Rochon's structural differentiator is the purity of his investment model's lineage. Giverny is among the handful of managers globally who adopted and maintained the original Buffett Partnership fee structure — zero management fee, a 6% hurdle, and a performance allocation above that — while running a portfolio deliberately capped at a best-ideas count. That architecture aligns incentives tightly: Rochon only generates significant fee income when clients earn a meaningful real return, and his own capital compounds under the identical terms. Succession risk is a recognized fragility, as Rochon remains the firm's singular investment decision-maker entering his fourth decade of portfolio management.