Wally Weitz: From Traditional Value To Fast Growing Stocks

In his latest interview on the VVI Q&A Speaker Series at Brown University, Wally Weitz discussed his transition from traditional value to fast growing stocks. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Weitz: It took me a long time to get around to some of the higher quality businesses because they… I think… I don’t know if this was characteristic of old-time value people but the idea of something growing fast was… it was clearly worth more but it took a long time before I actually was willing to believe that the growth rate could continue.

Part of that is not understanding technology very well and thinking that the product cycles were short and so on but gradually with a few youngsters working with me and learning a little bit about some of these things I got more comfortable.

Now of course we’ve been in a long-term bull market for these fast-growing things and the internet stocks and the platform stocks and that sort of thing and so you get constantly reinforced because the thing you bought, it works.

It may be because you were smart and made a good decision or it may just be because of the index money flows and all sorts of other factors so I try to remind my colleagues not to ignore the more prosaic companies if they’re actually really pretty cheap.

You can watch the entire interview here: