Glenn Greenberg

Reported price is calculated from the reported value and share count. It is not the investor's actual purchase price.

“Going for too much certainty can hold you back—there is no certainty.”

Glenn Greenberg is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Brave Warrior Advisors and one of the most experienced practitioners of concentrated fundamental investing. After studying literature at Yale, he worked as a teacher and school principal before earning an MBA from Columbia Business School. He began his investment career at Morgan Guaranty Trust and later spent five years researching investments for a private investment organization at Central National-Gottesman. In 1984, after approximately a decade in the industry, he founded Chieftain Capital Management with John Shapiro.

Chieftain began with approximately $40 million, about two-thirds of which was family capital. Greenberg later stated that by 2006 the original capital had compounded to roughly 100 times its starting value before fees. The method was deliberately unglamorous: concentrated ownership of understandable, undervalued businesses, while avoiding turnarounds, poor-quality companies, intensely competitive industries and technologies the team could not understand. Following the separation of Chieftain’s partners in 2009, Greenberg continued the strategy through Brave Warrior Advisors.

Greenberg regards concentration as a defence against ignorance. Owning fewer companies permits deeper knowledge of each business and makes it easier to distinguish temporary price volatility from permanent deterioration. He defines risk not as fluctuating quotations but as the probability that a company’s business trajectory changes dramatically for the worse. Accordingly, Brave Warrior seeks businesses with limited competition, high returns on capital, strong free-cash-flow generation, durable balance sheets and candid managers who focus on operating rather than promoting their companies.

Valuation is grounded primarily in free cash flow. Greenberg has argued that purchasing a decent business at roughly a 10% free-cash-flow yield, combined with modest growth, can produce an attractive long-term return without requiring heroic assumptions or multiple expansion. Most holdings are intended to be dependable “workhorses”; occasionally, the firm finds a “racehorse” with an unusually large opportunity and invests more heavily. He distrusts elaborate long-range models, preferring to study historical results, identify the few variables that determine value, and use probability and judgment rather than false precision.

• Glenn Greenberg — Graham & Doddsville Interview, 2010 ↗
• Columbia Business School — Glenn Greenberg Profile ↗
• Columbia Business School — Glenn Greenberg and Value Investing ↗
• The Posse Foundation — Glenn Greenberg Biography and Interview ↗