Hedge Fund - Wintergreen Advisers

David Winters founded Wintergreen Advisers in 2005 after a career at Franklin Mutual Advisers, where he served as chief investment officer. Wintergreen engages in fundamental research and compares the market value of public companies to quantities such as book value and earnings. It primarily invests in global equities. Wintergreen prefers to buy and hold a relatively small number of stocks over a long time horizon.

It’s supposed to be hard to find good companies with excellent management teams selling at cheap prices, and David Winters of Wintergreen Advisors has a history of dealing with this challenge by going as far afield as necessary- and digging into financial reports as deep as necessary- to find stocks that meet this criteria. As a relatively small fund, Wintergreen also doesn’t need to find too many stock picks- it only reported 12 positions reported in its 13F portfolio for the third quarter of 2012. The five largest of these holdings accounted for 61% of the portfolio. This gives it an advantage over larger value funds, which might need to find 20 or 30 stock picks and thus would be forced to compromise on pricing or growth potential.

David Winters worked at Franklin Mutual Advisers before founding Wintergreen, serving as the Chief Investment Officer. More recently, in contrast to his history of getting involved in more obscure companies, Winters has been quite capable of finding large cap stocks which he believes are undervalued by the market.