19th century I've ever readoutput: title: Bill Miller, the Former Legg Mason Manager Who Beat the Market for 15 Years, Shares His Investing Secrets

Few mutual fund managers can come close to this former Legg Mason portfolio manager's 15-year market-beating record. Below he discusses lessons he has learned, plus his firm's top ten holdings.

of the late 19th century.output: Bill Miller, 74, ex-Legg Mason star manager, on beating the market for 15 years, bitcoin and his best and worst stock picks

By John Dobosz, Forbes Staff

In the pantheon of successful mutual fund managers, Peter Lynch is perhaps the most famous, running Fidelity’s Magellan fund from 1977 to 1990 and racking up a 29.2% annualized return over his 13-year tenure as manager. Just as Lynch retired from his gig in Boston, down in Baltimore, Legg Mason’s Bill Miller III took up the torch of producing market-beating returns.

An Army veteran and former philosophy Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, Miller started comanaging Legg Mason Value Trust in 1982 and took over as solo manager in 1990. With smart early investments in hyper-growth stocks like America Online and Amazon.com, Miller’s annual performance topped the S&P 500 Index for 15 straight years from 1990 through 2005. A stubbornly overweight position in financial stocks going into the 2007-2009 recession humbled the hot-hand manager, who eventually stepped down as manager in 2012.

Just after departing Legg Mason, Miller was on the verge of scoring his biggest win. Attending an informative lecture in 2012 prompted the stock market superstar to allocate 1% of his personal portfolio into bitcoin at prices averaging around $700. Bitcoin now trades near $60,000 per coin of the blue-chip crypto asset.

Today Miller’s son, Bill Miller IV, run Miller Value Partners, which is focused on value stocks and manages the Miller Income (LMCJX) mutual fund, as well as two ETFs: Miller Value Partners Appreciation (MVPA) and Miller Value Partners Leverage (MVPL). The younger Miller is chief investment officer and principal owner. Total assets under management are approximately $290 million. In 2023, the partnership sold the Opportunity Trust, with more than $1 billion in assets, to Patient Capital Management, headed up by longtime Legg Mason analyst and manager, Samantha McLemore.

In this interview Miller, now 74, shares insights on how he beat the market for a decade and a half and assess opportunities in the current market. – J.D.

Forbes: You said that you came to Legg Mason in 1980 with a negative net worth and making $39,000 a year. Things are much different for you now, so could you share what made you what you are, and what people could learn from it?

Bill Miller III: I grew up in South Florida and came from what could generously be called modest circumstances. My dad’s last job was as a cab driver. When I was nine-years old, I saw himI saw him reading the paper one day and he had the paper open to what turned out to be the stock pages, which are not in the papers anymore. They were back then, and just numbers and letters, so it didn’t look like the comics or the sports–the stuff in the newspaper in which I had interest. I said to him, what’s that, and he says that’s the financial page, and I asked why are you looking at that? I think it was probably something like General Motors that he pointed to and said, that’s a big car company. They make Buick and Cadillac and Chevy. That number is what it would cost to buy one share of it. I said, what’s a share? He said it’s a little tiny piece of the business. If the company does well, it will go up, and you can make money. I then told him ,“I want to learn about stocks because I want to make money but I don’t want to do any work.” If you own the S&P 500, over time it goes up by itself, but if you want to do more than what the market does, then that does take work, a fair amount of it.

Forbes: You were an Army Intelligence Officer. Can you talk about what you did in the Army, and how it influenced your intellect?

Miller: I got a low draft number in 1969 and was headed to Vietnam as a rifle platoon leader, but was diverted after Infantry School to Military Intelligence for six months of specialized intel training, and spent the balance of the next several years in Germany. The war ended in 1975, and I got an early release. I went to Johns Hopkins to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. I had to take a job, so I worked at a food brokerage place as a part-time accountant, and eventually I got on

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