Marty Whitman's glass-half-full take on market

'There are great values out there now,' says octogenarian founder of Third Avenue Management

Marty Whitman, the octogenarian dean of deep-value investing, sees great bargains to be snapped up from the current stock market meltdown.

"It's a great time," enthused the 83-year-old founder of New York-based Third Avenue Management LLC before speaking yesterday at a conference organized by AIC Ltd.

"We can't try to pick the bottom, but it seems to me that there are great values out there now, just like in 1974," the firm's co-chief investment officer said in an interview.

The stock market crash of 1973-74, which affected all the major stock markets around the world, lasted 694 days before bottoming out.

"Everything went down every day, and if you bought, you hit a lot of 10-baggers," recalled Mr. Whitman. "I hope that we do it with a lot of what we are doing now."

Mr. Whitman, who buys stocks he considers to be "safe and cheap," still oversees the firm's flagship mutual fund, Third Avenue Value, in the United States.

The former Wall Street analyst with a background in distressed investments didn't start his fund company until 1990 at 65, an age when most people retire. As of Aug. 31, his global fund has posted an average annual return of 14.4 per cent since inception.

His colleague, Ian Lapey, who is in his early 40s and is the designated successor to Mr. Whitman, runs the similarly managed AIC Global Focused Fund sold in Canada.

With the U.S. government bailing out American International Group Inc., and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filing for bankruptcy protection this week, Mr. Whitman described the unfolding events as "the most severe financial crisis" that he has seen.

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