Weitz Investment Management

Founder Wallace R. "Wally" Weitz and Bradley P. Hinton serve as co-Chief Investment Officers, a partnership that dates to Hinton joining in 1994. Both remain active portfolio managers, and Weitz has publicly stated that the overwhelming majority of his personal net worth is invested in the firm's strategies alongside clients. The small research team reports to them, and investment decisions are centralized rather than committee-driven.

There is no formal relationship. However, Weitz Investment Management is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska — the same city as Berkshire Hathaway — and Wally Weitz has openly acknowledged Buffett's influence on his value-oriented philosophy. Berkshire Hathaway stock has also appeared as a top holding in certain Weitz-managed funds for extended periods, reflecting philosophical alignment rather than any business connection between the firms.

Weitz invests exclusively in publicly traded securities — common stocks, fixed income, and convertible bonds — across capitalizations ranging from mid-cap to mega-cap. The firm does not participate in private funding rounds, venture capital, or direct private equity acquisitions. Liquidity is a core tenet of the strategy; the firm prefers being able to exit a position on any given trading day without lockups.

Portfolios typically hold between 30 and 60 names, making them meaningfully more concentrated than a broad-market index fund. The Hickory Fund, focused on mid-caps, has historically held fewer names than the flagship Value Fund. The firm argues that genuine high-conviction ideas are scarce and that concentration is a rational expression of conviction rather than a risk to be avoided.

Weitz relies on fundamental, bottom-up research conducted internally by its small Omaha-based team. The firm screens for businesses with durable competitive advantages, high returns on capital, and management teams it trusts. There is no proprietary software or alternative data signal; the sourcing process is a classical value-investor reading cycle of SEC filings, earnings calls, and annual reports filtered through a long-horizon lens.

The firm does not act as a fund-of-funds allocator. All capital in its mutual funds and separate accounts is deployed directly into individual securities chosen by the in-house research team. There is no sub-advisory arrangement to external managers.

Because the firm exclusively transacts in public markets, the concept of co-investment alongside external GPs does not apply in the traditional private-equity sense. The firm does, however, replicate its highest-conviction names across multiple strategies internally, creating shared economics among different fund shareholders when the same position appears in both the Value and Hickory funds, for example.