Third Avenue Funds
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Value Equity
Objective
Third Avenue's Value Equity strategy seeks to achieve absolute returns over the long term, while minimizing investment risk.
Investment Philosophy
We believe that capital appreciation in our portfolios is best achieved by identifying safe companies that are cheaply priced.
Investment Approach
Third Avenue adheres to a disciplined, bottom-up, value approach to investing.
The strategy invests opportunistically, paying little regard to market capitalization, sector, country or other benchmark oriented criteria. In keeping with Third Avenue's belief that diversification is a poor surrogate for knowledge, price consciousness and control, portfolios are relatively concentrated.
Third Avenue seeks to achieve its objective mainly by acquiring securities of well-financed companies at a discount to what management believes is their intrinsic value. Fundamental research is the foundation of our process, with a focus on balance sheet analysis.
Our team of investment professionals analyzes companies from the bottom-up in order to identify securities that we believe are safe and cheaply priced. We define "safe" to mean the issuer is well-capitalized with a strong balance sheet and high quality assets. The company should not have significant liabilities, whether on or off the balance sheet. The issuer should be run by a competent management team and management's interests should be aligned with those of its shareholders. Finally, the company must be engaged in a business that we understand, with reliable financial disclosures readily available to serve as objective benchmarks and help us evaluate the business, its values and dynamics. We consider an investment to be "cheap" if the security can be obtained at a market price substantially below a conservative valuation of the business as a private entity or takeover candidate.
