Weitz Investment Management

Weitz Investment Management

Wallace R. "Wally" Weitz founded Weitz Investment Management in 1983 in Omaha, Nebraska, after a decade spent as a security analyst at a local brokerage. The firm remains owner-operated, with Weitz serving as co-CIO alongside Bradley Hinton, who joined in 1994. The headquarters, a few miles from Berkshire Hathaway, is no accident; Weitz describes his process as value-oriented and long-horizon, prioritizing business quality over short-term price movements. The firm manages a family of no-load mutual funds alongside separate accounts for institutions and high-net-worth individuals. Weitz himself disclosed in shareholder letters that his personal net worth remains substantially invested in the strategies he manages, a structural alignment that reinforces the firm's buy-and-hold temperament. The firm runs concentrated portfolios, typically holding 30 to 60 names stretched across its core equity strategies. The Weitz Value Fund, the flagship, invests across capitalizations in what the firm calls "durable" businesses with high returns on capital and honest management — actual holdings have included Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet, and Liberty Broadband, as disclosed in its public quarterly filings. The Hickory Fund targets mid-cap names like Heico and Guidewire Software. On the fixed-income side, the Core Plus Income Fund takes an all-weather approach, blending high-quality government and corporate paper. Geographically, the firm invests primarily in North American equities, though it has occasionally dipped into European names such as Safran when valuations align. The firm does not operate as a private equity shop; it deploys capital exclusively through public-market securities, preferring liquidity to locked-up structures. Weitz Investment Management has scaled to several billion in assets under management across its mutual fund lineup and separate accounts, though exact asset totals are not regularly published. In September 2023, the firm announced the retirement of its longtime CFO and the appointment of a new chief compliance officer, a quiet governance refresh consistent with a shop built for continuity. The firm maintains a single operating hub in Omaha and has resisted the institutional drift toward opening satellite offices. Its research team remains small, with Weitz and Hinton actively running money rather than delegating to committees. While no adjacent philanthropic or real-asset vehicles bear the Weitz name, the founder's personal wealth-vehicle alignment creates an unusual economic gravity — when the funds buy, he buys alongside them. The structural differentiator is temperamental, not transactional. Weitz runs a public-equity strategy with the patience profile of a private equity firm, treating quarterly price quotations as noise rather than signals. The firm has navigated three market crashes without abandoning its concentrated value framework or chasing asset-gathering through trendy fund launches — a discipline that peers from the 1980s rarely sustained. Weitz himself is now past 70, but Hinton's 30-year tenure suggests the succession question has been answered operationally, if not ceremonially. The firm's independence and refusal to sell to a consolidator make it an artifact of a shrinking segment in the asset management industry.