Wally Weitz, Warren Buffett's Omaha neighbor in spirit — a Graham-and-Buffett-school value investor who founded his firm in 1983.
Life story
Wally Weitz is a New Orleans native who settled in Omaha, his wife Barbara's hometown. At 12, in 1961, he used profits from various small ventures to buy 10 shares of General Telephone & Electronics, selling them at a gain three years later.
As a teenager he went through a charting phase and joined a stock-picking club, before reading Benjamin Graham's "Security Analysis" and converting to value investing. He earned an economics degree from Carleton College in 1970. Little is publicly known about his parents.
How they got started
After college Weitz spent three years in New York as a securities analyst covering small companies at G.A. Saxton. In 1973 he joined Chiles, Heider & Co., a regional brokerage in Omaha, where he spent ten years as an analyst and portfolio manager.
In 1983, backed by local investors, he started Wallace R. Weitz & Company, and he ran its flagship Value Fund from 1986. The firm grew into an independent, employee-owned manager of several equity and bond funds.
In 2015 Weitz announced that, as part of succession planning, Brad Hinton and Dave Perkins would take over the Value Fund from 2016. "Clients want a succession plan," he said.
Investment style
Weitz combines Graham's price sensitivity and insistence on a margin of safety with Buffett's view that qualitative factors — those that let a company control its own destiny — can matter more than book value or reported earnings.
His short formula: understand the business, buy at a discount and be patient. He has been a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder for more than 35 years.
Best decisions
First stock at age 12 (1961)
He bought 10 shares of GTE at about $26 and sold them three years later at about $42 — the start of his investing journey.
Holding Berkshire Hathaway
Weitz has owned Berkshire Hathaway for more than 35 years — a clear example of his patient, long-term approach.
Partners Value Fund
According to Hedge Fund Alpha, the firm's flagship Partners Value fund beat the S&P 500 by more than 2.5 percentage points a year over a 15-year period.
Biggest mistakes
Limited public information
We could not find detailed accounts of specific mistakes acknowledged by Weitz in the public sources we reviewed.
Today
Weitz Investment Management remains an independent, employee-owned firm in Omaha, running equity and bond mutual funds and ETFs. Wally Weitz handed the Value Fund to his team in 2016; we did not find reliable recent information on his exact role in 2025–2026.
What to learn from following the portfolio
- The Weitz approach is to buy quality businesses at a discount and hold them; positions kept for years are the most meaningful signals.
- The firm runs several funds, and a 13F aggregates them all, with a 45-day delay.
- Buffett-school investors often favor insurers, banks and financials, which are usually not halal; for media, cable and consumer companies, check debt levels. Check each position's halal status in the Portfolio tab.
An introduction based on public sources — not investment advice. Spotted an error? Let us know.