JEAN-MARIE EVEILLARD

Eveillard was born in 1940 in Poitiers, France. He studied at HEC Paris — the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales — France's most selective business school.

After graduating in the early 1960s, he joined Societe Generale. In 1968, the bank posted him to New York to work at its US investment arm.

He never really went back. In 1979, he took over management of the SoGen International Fund, a tiny international mutual fund with about $15 million in assets.

Over the next 25 years, he grew it into a $23 billion fund. The name changed as ownership shifted — it eventually became the First Eagle Global Fund under First Eagle Investment Management — but the strategy never changed.

He was a committed value investor in the Benjamin Graham tradition. He held gold when he thought markets were vulnerable.

He bought cheap European and Asian stocks decades before emerging market investing was fashionable. The defining test came in the late 1990s.

He wouldn't buy internet stocks because he couldn't value them. Clients pulled $4 billion.

He kept his discipline. From 2000 to 2003, while the S&P 500 fell 50%, his fund held its ground.

In 2004, after a health scare, he handed the fund to Charles de Vaulx and Jean-Marc Roussy. He was awarded the Morningstar Lifetime Achievement Award that same year.

Eveillard's career was built almost entirely within First Eagle Investment Management — originally the US asset management arm of Societe Generale. The First Eagle Global Fund, which he ran for 25 years, invested across global equities and always held a meaningful position in gold as a hedge.

At its peak the fund managed over $20 billion. First Eagle as a whole now manages over $100 billion.

He also wrote a foreword to Seth Klarman's legendary out-of-print book 'Margin of Safety' — a rare honor that signals the company he kept among serious value investors.

Eveillard followed Benjamin Graham's value framework but applied it globally, which was unusual for a US-based fund in the 1980s. He wasn't interested in what companies earned quarter to quarter.

He wanted to know what they owned. He thought about stocks as fractional ownership of real businesses, not price signals to trade.

He also maintained a deep suspicion of periods when 'everything works.' That was usually when he was adding cash and gold to the portfolio as a hedge. His core principle was avoiding the permanent loss of capital.

Growth, in his view, was a byproduct of not losing money first.

His biggest win was the period from 2000 to 2003. While most equity funds fell 40-50%, the First Eagle Global Fund held its value because he had avoided tech stocks and held gold.

Clients who had fled for tech exposure during 1998-1999 watched their money evaporate. The investors who stayed with Eveillard were largely unscathed.

In long-run terms, turning $10,000 invested with him in 1979 into hundreds of thousands by 2004 — through two recessions, the Black Monday crash, and the dot-com implosion — is the compound record that tells the full story.

By his own admission, Eveillard sometimes held too much cash for too long — leaving returns on the table when markets recovered quickly. In the early 1980s bull market, his conservative positioning cost relative performance.

He was also criticized for being too early or too cautious at times, which is the polite version of 'he cost clients money they would have made if he'd been less careful.' For a man whose whole framework was capital preservation, that tension was permanent and deliberate.

Eveillard's framework came down to three rules: only buy things you understand, always require a margin of safety, and protect against the worst case. He said the greatest risk in investing is not volatility — it is the permanent loss of capital.

He thought most investors severely underpriced catastrophic loss and obsessed over short-term underperformance instead. He also believed that admitting uncertainty was not weakness — it was the beginning of responsible decision-making.

Eveillard was born in France and built his life in New York. He was known as a thoughtful mentor and a warm presence in value investing circles.

He championed Seth Klarman's 'Margin of Safety' years before it became a collector's item among investors — writing the foreword when almost nobody had heard of it. His French intellectual background gave him a patience and philosophical rigor that contrasted sharply with Wall Street's typical short-termism.

He studied at HEC Paris, one of France's most selective business schools. That foundation gave him an analytical base, but his real education was 25 years of managing money through crashes, bubbles, and bear markets while refusing to compromise.

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