2026 Ben Graham Conference – Chuck Royce on 50+ Years Of Experience; From The 73-74 Bear Market To Using AI For Research

In a fireside chat with WealthTrack’s Consuelo Mack at the 2026 Ben Graham Conference, hosted by CFA Society New York, Charles “Chuck” Royce reflected on more than half a century of small-cap investing. Royce identified small-cap stocks as a distinct asset class in the early 1970s and ran Royce’s Pennsylvania Mutual Fund from 1972, delivering roughly 12% average annualized returns over his tenure and beating the small-cap universe across nearly every long horizon. Now investing privately through Deer Mountain Capital, he spoke about how the asset class has evolved, why it endured a hard decade, and how his own approach has shifted toward compounding. Deer Mountain Capital Partners LLC is a registered investment business located in Greenwich, Connecticut. The firm is registered in Delaware and was established on Oct 08 2025,; there is little public information about the investment firm.

A Class That Took a Decade Off

Royce recalled taking over the fund in 1972, just before the brutal 1973-74 market, when his board questioned whether the strategy was working before it rebounded sharply in 1975. He noted that small-cap, which he loosely defined today as micro-cap under a couple of billion dollars and small-cap up to roughly $15 billion, has always alternated good and bad decades, and that the most recent decade was a poor one relative to large-cap. He pointed to the S&P equal-weight index, which he watches most closely because it is not distorted by the largest names, making new highs as a more encouraging signal.

He returned repeatedly to the shrinking number of public companies. Private equity, he noted, now buys businesses and sells them on to other private-equity firms rather than taking them public, so a company can cycle through several owners without ever returning to public markets. Takeovers of small companies by larger strategics, he added, remain a real way to make money in the space.