Glenn Greenberg of Brave Warrior Advisers, formerly Chieftain Capital Management, prefers to keep a concentrated portfolio that he calls his ‘defense against ignorance’ according to Guru Focus. He currently holds just 11 stocks even though he has $2.16 billion worth of assets under management. After five years at JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM), Greenberg developed his approach to investing at a relatively small firm whose owner required him to become familiar with every aspect of a company’s financials before making any trades, eschewing even pre-made spreadsheets as shortcuts that prevent investors from becoming truly knowledgeable about the companies they evaluate.
Chieftain, which he started with John Shapiro in 1984, beat the market by an average of 8 percent per year. The two have now gone their separate ways, and Greenberg says that he is scaling back so that he can look at source material himself instead of relying on information that has been processed by other people. This incredible attention to detail, while limiting him to a smaller number of stocks than most other fund managers, has been proven to work for him over the long haul.
Greenberg Increased Positions
Greenberg nearly tripled his stake in Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL), increasing his position by 190 percent to 4.4 million shares. He increased his position on Oracle by 13.6 percent to 6.1 million shares and Charles Schwab Corp (NYSE:SCHW) by 7 percent to 9.4 million shares. His holdings of Express Scripts went up 4.9 percent to 4.2 million shares and Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) by 1.3 percent to 2.8 million shares. Greenberg also slightly increased his positions (less than one percent each) in Valeant Pharmaceuticals Intl Inc (NYSE:VRX), VistaPrint Limited (NASDAQ:VPRT), and Primerica, Inc. (NYSE:PRI). Valeant Pharmaceuticals is his largest position, representing 26.5 percent of his Greenberg’s portfolio, followed by VistaPrint Limited (NASDAQ:VPRT) with 13.2 percent and Express Scripts Holding Company (NASDAQ:ESRX) with 12 percent respectively.
Decreased Positions
Greenberg sold 39 percent of his shares in Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), dropping down to 77,016 shares making up just 3.14 percent of his portfolio. He also sold 22 percent of his stake in Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ:FISV) dropping to 1.1 million shares and 1.2 percent of his shares in Higher One Holdings, Inc (NYSE:ONE), down to 6.3 million shares.
