Other Omaha manager gains following

He was joking. But such ritualistic behavior might not seem odd for a 61-year-old who wears a plaid shirt almost every day.

Unusual habits aside, Weitz is gaining wide acceptance. Morningstar recently listed Weitz among a handful of early favorites for its manager of the year award in the domestic fund category. The reason: Weitz Partners Value has returned nearly 15 percent this year, tops among large-cap value funds. The $604 million fund is far ahead of the nearly 3 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500. The past four years, Weitz has co-managed the fund with Bradley Hinton.

Weitz Partners Value counts Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock as its top holding, and the shares have risen 25 percent this year. Another holding that’s fared well is Coinstar Inc., the company that places coin counting and other machines in supermarkets and convenience stores. That stock is up 52 percent. And European cable network owner Liberty Global Inc. is up 40 percent.

Weitz doesn’t focus on sectors but evaluates stocks individually, with a strong emphasis on price.

Below are excerpts from a recent interview:

Q.Where you do see the stock market and economy heading?

A. The economy is still moving forward, but slowly and unevenly — enough that people still get scared from time to time. People were happy in the first quarter, scared in the second quarter, happy in July, and worried in August, and so on.

When our firm talks to companies one by one, almost all those that we’ve invested in are, at worst, finding ways to move forward with cost-cutting. Buffett has said he owns 70 companies, and almost all of them are seeing upticks in their business, and he doesn’t think there will be a double-dip recession.

We may have another year or two of choppy sideways trading in the stock market, but eventually it will come out on the upside.

Q.What mistakes did you make in 2008, when the funds suffered losses of around 40 percent, slightly worse than the S&P 500?