Marty Whitman

Third Avenue; safe-and-cheap, balance-sheet primacy, distressed

Martin J. Whitman (1924–2018) founded Third Avenue Management in 1986 and ran the Third Avenue Value Fund for decades. His methodology prioritised net asset value and financial strength over earnings, inverting the Graham income-statement tradition. He codified his approach in works including 'The Aggressive Conservative Investor' and became a practitioner-theorist of distressed investing.