You'll be re-directed to the Financial Professional site.
A Letter from Our Chair and CEO
Our Journey
From our founding in San Francisco in 1930, we’ve grown to become one of the world's largest employee-owned investment firms. But our growth has been an outcome of serving our clients well rather than a goal in itself. As much as we have grown and evolved, we’ve deliberately kept many things the same. Nearly a century later, our firm's founding principles of investment focus and client alignment still guide us. We remain fiercely independent and still manage money with a single investment philosophy offered through a select set of strategies. Our focus means we put more resources behind fewer strategies and more confidence behind every decision. We’ve preserved these principles while relentlessly pursuing improvement in how we develop our people and refine our investment process.
Our people
Our investment approach starts with world-class investors, who, in the words of our former Chair, John Gunn, “get unnatural satisfaction from taking one dollar and turning it into two” for our clients.
We also believe truly exceptional investors are made, not born, and we've cultivated an environment where our team can apprentice and excel. We give them time to develop deep, long-term perspectives, surrounded by experienced colleagues who mentor them. Passionate investors seek each other out, and that community is what we continue to build.
We structure compensation to reward cooperation, because internal competition kills collaboration and fear corrodes objective decision-making. We direct our competitive energy toward the markets, not each other.
The same culture extends across the firm, from our investment team to client service and operations. We keep the organization flat, so information flows and the best ideas prevail.
The opportunity to collaborate with great people is why most of us devote our careers to Dodge & Cox. The resulting stability and intellectual capital, compounded over generations, make us uniquely suited for long-term investing.
Our process
Though we are proud of our investment team, we don't have star managers. We believe small teams of excellent investors can generate better long-term results than even the most talented individual. At Dodge & Cox, our investment process is the star, and we've spent decades refining it. Investing is a series of balancing acts between thoroughness and urgency, depth of insight and breadth of perspective, conviction and humility. Our investment process reflects these needs.
The process starts with an analyst's deep fundamental research and advocacy. A devil's advocate then stress-tests the advocacy, and a small group of analysts who know the sector best vets it. Only then does the relevant Investment Committee consider the recommendation. Throughout the process, we debate ideas without sugarcoating disagreements while maintaining a collegiality that makes working together rewarding.
We also learn from our experience. Periodic offsites give us the chance to examine how we work and improve. For instance, we've refined our Investment Committee rules of engagement over many years to reduce potential bias from how we make decisions. Committee members debate analysts' recommendations and then vote anonymously over multiple rounds, so each member can think independently and reconsider as new information surfaces.
Markets are inherently dynamic, presenting new challenges and opportunities, and we must evolve to navigate both well. Over the years, we've added research capabilities—international and emerging markets coverage and quantitative and macro teams—and broadened the information our analysts can draw upon. Most recently, we've embedded third-party and proprietary AI tools in our research team and across the firm to enhance the speed and depth of our insights.
Our commitment
Over nearly a century, Dodge & Cox has grown from a small San Francisco firm serving individual investors into an investment manager for individuals and institutions worldwide. Through wars, financial crises, pandemics, and market bubbles, we've maintained our founding principles of investment focus and client alignment while constantly challenging ourselves to improve. Every day, we ask ourselves what we can do to be a better firm for our clients tomorrow—a question that will continue to guide us through the century ahead.
At Dodge & Cox, we focus on what we love to do—pursuing investment excellence—because we know better outcomes mean greater opportunities for the clients and communities we serve, now and for generations to come.
Our Culture
Our mission is to deliver superior long-term investment results to enable our clients to achieve their financial goals. Since our founding, we've cultivated a culture of collaboration that supports our team-oriented approach and underpins our ability to deliver on our mission. We also strive to be good corporate citizens and play an active role in our community.
Our Offices
Our dedicated team is available to help you.
Investment queries
Stephen Haswell
Managing Director
Dodge & Cox (Europe) GmbH
stephen.haswell@dodgeandcox.com
+49 151 2911 0933 (direct)
+49 89 203006 472 (main)
Gunnar Knierim
Director
Dodge & Cox (Europe) GmbH
gunnar.knierim@dodgeandcox.com
+49 151 5563 1925 (direct)
+49 89 203006 471 (main)
General enquiries
EUclientservice@dodgeandcox.com
Munich Office
Dodge & Cox (Europe) GmbH
Maximilianstr. 13
80539 Munich
Germany
Endnotes
1. Khorana, Ajay, Henri Servaes, and Lei Wedge. “Portfolio Manager Ownership and Fund Performance.” Journal of Financial Economics 85, no. 1 (2007): 179–204.
2. Del Guercio, Diane, and Jonathan Reuter. “Mutual Fund Performance and the Incentive to Generate Alpha.” The Journal of Finance 69, no. 4 (2014): 1673–1704.
3. Nanda, Vikram, Z. Jay Wang, and Lu Zheng. “Family Values and the Star Phenomenon: Strategies of Mutual Fund Families.” The Review of Financial Studies 17, no. 3 (2004): 667–698.
4. Jones, Robert C., and Russ Wermers. “Active Management In Mostly Efficient Markets.” Financial Analysts Journal 67, no. 6 (2011): 29–45.
5. Patel, Saurin, and Sergei Sarkissian. “To Group or Not to Group? Evidence from Mutual Fund Databases.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 52, no. 5 (2017): 1989–2021.
6. Gil-Bazo, Javier, and Pablo Ruiz-Verdú. “The Relation Between Price and Performance in the Mutual Fund Industry.” The Journal of Finance 64, no. 5 (2009): 2153–2183.
7. Edelen, Roger, Richard Evans, and Gregory Kadlec. “Shedding Light on ‘Invisible’ Costs: Trading Costs and Mutual Fund Performance.” Financial Analysts Journal 69, no. 1 (2013).
8. Cremers, Martijn, and Ankur Pareek. “Patient Capital Outperformance: The Investment Skill of High Active Share Managers Who Trade Infrequently.” Journal of Financial Economics 122, no. 2 (2016): 288–306.