Winters Seeing Plenty of "Fat, Slow Pitches"

David Winters, whose Wintergreen fund has a solid market-beating track record, says that he’s seeing a lot of “fat, slow pitches” in the market right now, and that he’s particularly high on Asian stocks.

“We’ve been more or less a net buyer recently,” Winters tells Barron’s. “What is just so striking is that you can buy great companies at the most reasonable prices I have ever seen. And most sentiment, especially in the West, is just not terribly upbeat. So you really don’t have a lot of people who want to buy stocks today, which creates a lot of fat, slow pitches.”

Winters says his cash position is only about 10% right now, significantly lower than it was during the market meltdown of 2008. He says investors need to be selective, and “pay attention to things like whether a business has multicurrency diversification in terms of its earnings, and does it have the ability to do well in almost any environment?”

Right now, there are some such firms in the U.S., and a lot in Switzerland, he says. About 70% of his fund’s assets are in companies outside of the U.S., with many located in Asia, he says.

Winters also talks about his long-term, low-turnover approach. “We live in a world where people want to trade constantly, and there are some people who succeed at that for short periods of time,” he says. “But the most successful business people in almost every country have owned a good business and stuck with it. … There are lots of opportunities, but it has to be more on a company-by-company basis, as opposed to where is the market going to be.”

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