在Fairholme Capital的Bruce Berkowitz的内心

Bruce Berkowitz.doesn’t worry about going against the flow — at least not in the short term. He is a concentrated value investor who bets on only a handful of stocks, so it comes with the territory.

“With the type of value investing I do, you look very wrong until you’re right,” asserts Berkowitz, founder and chief investment officer of Fairholme Capital Management in Miami. He emphasizes that his investing success stems from the very low price he is willing to pay for a given security. That gives him the greatest chance of making money in the long run, but it also means he’s often buying in the middle of a financial maelstrom (get more on Berkowitz’s value approach in “成功投资的3个步骤“）。

2013年，88亿美元的Fairholme基金受益于2011年的投资Berkowitz，包括美国银行公司和美国国际集团。当时，很多investors在金融危机中，这些股票被严重燃烧 - “这些公司几乎被摧毁，”他说 - 对双重衰退的担忧仍然在海湾保持最潜在的买家。

Berkowitz’s willingness to go against the herd paid off handsomely last year as financial stocks rallied strongly. Shareholders in the Fairholme Fund enjoyed a return of 35.54 percent in 2013, exceeding the 32.39 percent return of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. That performance helped Berkowitz win the top honor last month as亚博赞助欧冠一年的2014年金钱经理。自基金于1999年的成立以来，2013年年底，该基金已归还累计450.94％，而标准普尔500指数为64.68％。

“2013年，我们的成功是关于住宅房地产，”Berkowitz，55岁的人说：“但这正是为什么我们在2012年做得很好，为什么我们在2011年做出可怕。”

2006年从新泽西州搬到迈阿密的Berkowitz逃离了纽约金融世界的不变性和分散注意力的市场谈话，是一个大信徒investing远远超出了数字的良好本能。“你必须拥有自由艺术教育和历史和生物学感，”他说。

行为金融在时尚中非常重要，但它一直是Berkowitz的DNA的一部分。他争辩，人类是用于运动和动力的人。他说，在史前时代，如果成千上万的人在一个方向上运行，那就与他们一起运行而不是冒险的午餐，这是有道理的。然而，今天，investors需要认识到，这些自然趋势在市场上的长期成功工作。他说，在人群中搭配人群几乎保证失败。“布鲁斯非常聪明，非常勤奋，他向自己的鼓手游行”对冲基金亿万富翁Leon Cooperman, who has known Berkowitz for more than a decade, toldIIin 2011. “He’s a guy whose investing views I respect.”

Berkowitz, who loves complex financial stocks that value investors often avoid, aims to buy stocks at cheap price to obtain a margin of safety and to buy time for the market’s perceptions of a beaten-down stock to change. He then determines whether a company is essential to an economy. But because Fairholme is buying cheap, the companies in its portfolio have problems. Berkowitz, of course, wants fixable problems — perhaps a company that has been on the wrong end of what he calls “extreme capitalism,” like the financial crisis. In the case of the financial institutions that Fairholme bought, they were restructured, had plenty of liquidity and had demonstrated they were going to survive. Even so, investors stayed away from them until the beginning of 2013, when, Berkowitz says, “fear turned to greed, and the big bad banks were a little less hated.”

Berkowitz’s understanding of human nature goes back to his working-class upbringing in Chelsea, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. He says he was lucky to work in his father’s corner grocery store, where he got to see human dramas play themselves out daily: people willing to buy a lottery ticket and dream about winning, then arguing about a 25 cent cup of coffee. “I worked all my life, and it was very helpful to understand the difference between labor and capital and how tough it was to save money,” he says.

He was the first in his family to go to college, earning a BA in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1980. He joined a consulting firm after graduation and moved to England with his wife, Tracey. By 1982 he had joined Merrill Lynch & Co. in London, thinking he could do a better job than his broker. In 1987 Berkowitz, then managing money for 200 clients, moved to Shearson Lehman; later he would gravitate to Smith Barney. But in 1997, he decided to set up his own asset management firm in Short Hills, New Jersey. Early investments included the debt of WorldCom when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. By 2006, Berkowitz had moved to Florida. Before the crisis hit with full force in 2008, he had sold his financial stocks, including Countrywide Financial Corp. and Freddie Mac, because he considered them overleveraged amid crazy lending standards.

在危机之后，他看到了一个巨大的机会，介入这种现金并赚钱。2009年，他在花旗集团中买了股票。其他投资包括BOFA，他仍然持有，以及高盛集团。2011年，他争取佛罗里达房地产开发商圣乔公司，认为它具有光明的未来，与绿灯首都大卫·埃因霍恩正在押注该公司。最后，Berkowitz和Fairholme赢得了St. Joe的控制，并在其董事会上获得了席位。

More recently, Berkowitz has stepped into the fight over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Two of the Fairholme Fund’s best performers in 2013 were the preferred stock of Fannie and Freddie, which Berkowitz bought for one fifth of the liquidation value of the two companies.

2008年，政府将两家公司投入了保护统治，每次持续80％的股份，以换取首选股票支付10％的股票，并承诺将数十亿美元的资本注入恢复公司的利益。然而，2012年，政府改变了协议，消除了10％的利息，并将所有公司的利润作为股息。在Fannie Mae的情况下，预定的六月股息支付57亿美元的财政部将为政府带来总股息，达到1268亿美元。

Fairholme在华盛顿州的联邦索赔和美国地区法院提出了投诉，辩称政府违反了合同法，2012年的变革并有效地占据了股东的财产。Fairholme要求Fannie Mae和Freddie Mac恢复为其首选股东支付股息。“也许在委内瑞拉，前苏联或古巴，你可以接受某人的财产，但不是在美国，”他说。“我们冒着帮助重新播出非常重要的公司。”

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Berkowitz doesn’t object to government involvement in the two companies. He just wants a piece of the action. His investment thesis is that the mortgage giants are the only reason that the U.S. has a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, which is fuel for the housing and housing-related parts of the American economy. Private capital has always been a small part of the mortgage market; only the government is capable of nurturing a healthy mortgage market. “Everybody wins by resuscitating these two very important companies,” he says. Certainly Fairholme.

Bruce Berkowitz是今年的金钱经理IIs2014年美国投资管理奖.