In over 50 years of investing, this fund has the distinction of being the worst performing mutual fund of any I have ever owned. I've been holding this POS since January, 1998. I presently show a net, overall, total gain of barely 4%. That's NOT 4% annually. I'm talking 4% TOTAL for ten long years.
First, it was the Adelphia disaster. They rode it down to virtually nothing. I thought that maybe they had learned to dump their losers when it was obvious that they had made a huge mistake. No such luck.
Now, it's Countrywide. That's beginning to look like a repeat of Adelphia. By my calculation, the average share cost of CFC is around $33.
Being completely out of energy and material resource stocks was a costly mistake. I could live with that. However, the mortgage meltdown was, in my opinion, one of the most obvious and predictable events in recent memory. I've seen it coming for at least the last 2 years. In fact, the impact has, in my opinion, only begun to be felt. I've been anticipating a disastrous U.S. banking crisis the likes of which this country has not seen since the 1930s beginning in 1998 with the problems in Asia. I had confidence that the experienced portfolio managers at Weitz would also foresee what I saw and avoid just the sort of costly mistakes that they've made recently.
I've stuck with Weitz in the belief that their supposedly "conservative value" approach would offer a degree of protection. I now realize that their contrarian approach has even greater pitfalls.