The Stock Market’s Perplexing Rise Lifted Many Kinds of Funds

He has managed the fund since 2014, but it began in 1990, under the direction of his mentor, Martin Whitman. Mr. Whitman was known as a “vulture investor” for scooping up shares of deeply troubled — and very cheap — stocks.

Mr. Fine invests around the world and across market caps to find his bargains.

Recently, only about 40 percent of the fund’s assets were invested in U.S. companies, with the rest spread among countries like Germany and Italy. The assets were also distributed among market caps of every size.

Mr. Fine is willing to make big bets when he finds companies or industries he thinks others have misunderstood.

Take home building, represented by a variety of his recent holdings, including Interfor and Weyerhaeuser. Interfor, a Canadian company, operates lumber mills, while Weyerhaeuser owns timberlands and mills.

“Very little supply has been added to U.S. lumber markets,” he said. “Meanwhile, there’s been dramatic reduction in British Columbian supply. So supply has been reduced at a time when demand is rising very fast, and you’re enjoying record-breaking lumber prices.”

The pandemic has contributed to that demand, because many people have used their time stuck at home to renovate, he said.

For similar reasons, the fund has stakes in two suppliers of other sorts of building materials — Buzzi Unicem and Eagle Materials. The former is an Italian cement and concrete company with a big American presence, the latter a U.S. maker of cement, concrete and wallboard.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/mutfund/the-stock-markets-perplexing-rise-lifted-many-kinds-of-funds.html