Wally Weitz '70, former Board of Trustees chair, is profiled by the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on his acumen as a stock picker and the challenges associated with running such a firm in the age of index funds. The article says "Mr. Weitz is a stock picker at a time when growing numbers of investors are losing faith in them." Last year, stock investors yanked $127 billion out of actively managed stock mutual funds, while plowing a net $70 billion into index funds and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which are similar to index funds but trade throughout the day instead of just at day's end. Over three years, his Weitz Value mutual fund has outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by an average of about one percentage point a year and beat about 90% of similar stock funds. Weitz, along with his family, made the lead gift to the Weitz Center for Creativity. The Weitz family is the largest single donor in College history at $25 million, as they also gave $10 million to launch Carleton's $300 million capital campaign, successfully completed in June 2010.
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