Since its founding in 1970, the Sequoia has earned its reputation as one of the best investment funds ever to have existed.
But, as I have covered throughout this series, the fund and its founders, Bill Ruane, Richard Cunniff, and Robert Goldfarb, faced an uphill struggle in its early years.
During the first few years of its life, the Sequoia farmed underperformed the market substantially, as investors piled into the so-called “nifty fifty” stocks, and shunned value stocks. Sequoia avoided much of the hype surrounding the “nifty fifty,” which helped the fund outperform in the second half of the decade, but this came at the expense of the early underperformance.