CHARLES BRANDES

In the early 1970s Brandes was a stockbroker in San Diego when Benjamin Graham walked into his office. Graham was the father of value investing and Buffett's teacher.

The two hit it off, and Brandes got a direct download of the master's thinking. In 1974, right in the teeth of a brutal bear market, he started his own firm.

His bet was simple. Buy cheap, hated, beaten-down companies and wait.

It worked. Brandes Investment Partners grew into one of the biggest value shops on earth, managing over $111 billion at its 2007 peak.

His real edge was going where other value investors would not, hunting bargains in foreign and emerging markets while everyone else stayed home.

Brandes Investment Partners is the whole story. He founded it in 1974 in San Diego and ran it for over four decades.

Its flagship was the Brandes International Equity strategy, one of the most respected global value funds of its era. At the top in 2007 the firm managed more than $111 billion.

Then the 2008 crash and years of value underperformance gutted it, dropping assets to around $40 billion. He also built the Brandes Institute, a research arm that publishes on value investing and how emotions wreck investor returns.

He stepped away from the firm in 2018.

Brandes is a hardcore Graham disciple. The method is boring on purpose.

Work out what a business is actually worth. Buy it for far less than that.

Wait for the market to wake up. He calls the gap between price and value the margin of safety, which is just a cushion so you do not get wiped out when you are wrong.

The twist that made him famous is where he looked. Most value investors stuck to US stocks.

Brandes went hunting for the same bargains in Tokyo, London, and emerging markets. Cheap is cheap, he figured, no matter what currency it trades in.

The win was going global before value investors thought that was allowed. In the 1980s and 1990s, while American money stayed home, Brandes bought cheap international companies across Europe, Japan, and emerging markets.

His Brandes International Equity strategy became one of the most respected global value funds anywhere, and it helped push the firm past $111 billion in assets by 2007. Most of his peers thought Graham's playbook only worked on US stocks.

Brandes proved a 1930s idea from Benjamin Graham still printed money on shares trading in Tokyo, London, and São Paulo.

The mistake, if you can call staying disciplined a mistake, was refusing to bend after 2008. Deep value got crushed for years while growth and tech soared.

Brandes stuck to his beaten-down bargains anyway. Clients ran for the exits.

Assets collapsed from over $111 billion in 2007 to roughly $40 billion. Being early and being wrong look identical for a very long time, and he lived that pain in real numbers.

The lesson is brutal. Even a proven method can spend a full decade in the wilderness, and not every client will wait around to see it work again.

His rules come straight from Graham. First, price is what you pay and value is what you get, so never confuse the two.

Second, always demand a margin of safety. Buy so cheap that being wrong still does not ruin you.

Third, ignore the market almost all of the time, because doing what everyone else is doing is often the wrong move. Fourth, be patient to the point of stubbornness.

Brandes wrote two books hammering these points home. His whole message is that value investing is dull, uncomfortable, and it works, but only if you can actually stick with it when it hurts.

Brandes has kept most of his personal life quiet, though not all of it stayed private. His third divorce became public in 2018 and lined up with his exit from the firm.

He has long been based in San Diego, where he built both his company and his reputation as a local philanthropist. Beyond markets, he is known as a patron of value investing education, spending real money to keep Benjamin Graham's ideas alive for a new generation of investors.

Brandes earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Bucknell University in 1965. He later started an MBA at San Diego State University but never finished it.

The degree that mattered came from a chance meeting, not a classroom. As a young broker he crossed paths with Benjamin Graham, and that conversation taught him more about money than any lecture ever did.

As an Amazon Associate, Netfigo earns from qualifying purchases. Book links above may be affiliate links.