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The Emerging Markets Stock Fund marks its 5-year anniversary. Learn more about our approach and the Fund.

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Over 95 Years of Investment Focus

A Letter from Our Chair and CEO

“An investment management firm is dependent on the quality of its personnel and on their ability to cooperate effectively in the decision-making process... It is good to know that my younger associates are determined to manage further growth in a way that will maintain and improve the firm’s ability to meet the specific needs of its clients.”
—E. Morris Cox, Co-Founder

 

Our firm was founded in 1930 in the wake of the Roaring Twenties. In response to the speculative excesses of that era, our founders believed clients’ interests would be best served by a focused, long-term, valuation-aware investment strategy offered at reasonable and transparent fees. That belief is as strong today as it’s ever been.

 

In our sixth generation of leadership, we know our success is dependent on our clients’ success. To achieve that success—measured by excellent long-term investment performance and exceptional service—we are committed to both preserving our cultural bedrock and building on it.

 

Honed over nearly 100 years, our foundational pillars have made Dodge & Cox durable. In academic research, these same pillars have been shown to be shared characteristics among successful active managers.

 

1. Our independence enables long-term client alignment. Dodge & Cox is 100% owned by our active employees. This is critically important to ensure we are aligned with our clients and can focus on what matters most to them—long-term investment results. Furthering our alignment, our Investment Committee members invest significantly alongside our clients.1

 

2. We focus on delivering investment results to our clients, not growing assets. No one at Dodge & Cox is compensated for bringing in new business. We focus our energy and resources on maximizing long-term returns across a select set of strategies.2,3 This focus is critical to our ability to drive results for our clients.

 

3. We have a seasoned and collaborative investment team.4 Our manager tenure and retention are among the highest in the investment management industry. Our collaborative process leverages this experience, facilitates the exchange of ideas, and sharpens our thinking.5 We aim to be the employment destination of choice for exceptionally talented long-term investors who value a collegial, high-performance culture.

 

4. Our low fees and expenses allow clients to compound more of their investment over time. We aim to keep fees low.6 Consistent with our long-term investment horizon, we have historically had long average holding periods and low turnover ratios, which reduces trading costs.7

 

5. We stake out non-consensus positions. We build differentiated portfolios with consistently high active share.8 The quality of our team’s fundamental research gives us the fortitude to persist with long-term contrarian positions. We believe this persistence, especially through periods of volatility, is key to creating value for our clients. 

 

While these characteristics are essential to delivering superior long-term investment results, they are not static. As investors, we’ve interviewed thousands of management teams over the years and have identified a common thread among the most exceptional: the passionate pursuit of improvement. At Dodge & Cox, we’ve ingrained this philosophy into our own DNA. Regardless of the progress we make, we continue to refine our investment process, optimize talent development, enhance our clients’ experience, and strengthen our operating foundation. The continuous pursuit of excellence across all aspects of our business—against a backdrop of dynamic markets and an evolving world—requires unrelenting curiosity, drive, and humility.

 

As we look ahead, we will stay true to our cultural roots and foundational pillars while searching for ways to further improve. If you’re an existing client or Fund shareholder, we are grateful for the confidence you have placed in our firm and our people. If we have not previously worked with you, we hope you will give us an opportunity to be of service to you.

 

With gratitude on behalf of our colleagues,

 

David Hoeft                                                   Roger Kuo     
Chair and CIO                                              CEO and President

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.

Image showing the culture at Dodge & Cox

Learn more about our culture

We believe the best way to accomplish our mission is within a collaborative team environment. By encouraging and incorporating diverse perspectives and creating an open forum for analysis and debate, we believe we make better decisions for our investment strategies, our clients, and our firm.

Image showing Dodge & Cox volunteering in the community

View how we support our community

Charitable giving and volunteerism are strong elements of our culture. Our founders believed Dodge & Cox should play an active role in our community and prioritized providing guidance and financial support to a range of community-minded initiatives. Today, we continue that tradition by engaging in charitable giving and facilitating employee volunteerism.

Our Offices

San Francisco

Headquarters, Investment Management, Global Research, and Client Service

London

Client Service

Munich

Client Service

Shanghai

China Research

We’re here to help.

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Call us at +1 800-621-3979

Client resources are available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Eastern Time

 

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Dodge & Cox Funds
P.O. Box 219502
Kansas City, MO 64121-9502 

 

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Dodge & Cox Funds 
801 Pennsylvania Ave
Suite 219502
Kansas City, MO 64105-1307

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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.