Oakmark's Bill Nygren: Investors penalize 'shareholder-unfriendly' CEOs too much

Investors may be penalizing corporate management too much for their decision to redirect money from long-term investments to paying dividends and buying back their stock, top portfolio manager Bill Nygren said Thursday. Blue-chip U.S. corporate executives have gotten criticism from a variety of sources over spending their money this way. For instance, BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Laurence D. Fink, whose company is the largest shareholder of some of the world's largest companies, has written letters to S&P 500 companies asking that they not pay out their earnings if doing so would compromise their longer growth. Yet Mr. Nygren called that criticism “a little misplaced." “I don't think many companies think that they're supply constrained: Building more plants isn't going to grow demand,” he said. “There isn't enough demand to put companies in a short-supply situation.” The Oakmark Select Fund, which Mr. Nygren started managing in 1996, is in the top 2% among funds in its category over the last 15 years, and it beats the S&P 500 return by nearly 5.5% over that period, according to Morningstar Inc. data through June 24. Overall, Mr. Nygren offered a more sanguine view on market valuations than GMO chief investment officer Jeremy Grantham, who spoke, like Mr. Nygren, at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. Mr. Nygren said investors have been “tougher” on short-term stock-price boosting efforts “because it tends to be easier to measure.” Mr. Nygren also said the market continues to shy away from investing in sectors “where people were scarred from what happened six or seven years” ago, a reference to his far-higher-than-benchmark bet on financial services companies.