John Neff

John Neff was the manager of the Vanguard Windsor Fund. Over his more than 30 years at the helm, the fund routinely featured in the top 5 percent of all US mutual funds. He is widely known as a strict value investor, who looks for solid, dividend paying companies.

Neff is also known as a contrarian thinker. His investment of a large portion of his fund into Ford in 1984 is his most well known success. At the time, many investors feared the company would go bankrupt, and its P/E ratio had sunk to 2.5. Neff paid an average price of under $14, and within three years, the price increased to $50, making Windsor profits of half a billion dollars.

Neff appears in a chapter of The New Money Masters, (1989) by John Train, who has also authored John Neff on Investing, (1999)