The Value Iconoclast

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Every summer, Dave Iben takes his team at Kopernik Global Investors away from the sultry air of St. Petersburg, Florida. They’ve decamped to Belgrade, Budapest, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Lisbon, London, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. This summer, they’ll head back to South America, traveling to Rio de Janeiro.“It’s important to get out there and see the world,” Iben says.

Dave Iben and Alissa Corcoran, Kopernik’s co-CIOs, at the Kamoa Kakula Copper project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Every summer, Dave Iben takes his team at Kopernik Global Investors away from the sultry air of St. Petersburg, Florida. They’ve decamped to Belgrade, Budapest, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Lisbon, London, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. This summer, they’ll head back to South America, traveling to Rio de Janeiro.

“It’s important to get out there and see the world,” Iben says. “The stereotypes that we often have in America just aren’t right.”

He cites his personal love of travel as the foundation for what the $9.4 billion firm calls its “global immersion” program. Wanderlust similarly informs Iben’s global investment strategy: At the end of last year, its flagship Global All-Cap strategy’s top holdings were in companies based in South Africa, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Singapore, and Australia, as well as the U.S.

The firm is named after the Renaissance polymath who discovered that the world revolves around the sun rather than the earth: Mikolaj Kopernik, more commonly known as Nicolaus Copernicus. Kopernik, the firm states, “placed his hands-on analysis above the zeitgeist of the public at large.”

That’s a hint that Iben is an iconoclast, which in this day and age means a value investor — one following a strategy that has been out of favor in an era where big U.S. tech names have pushed the S&P 500 to record highs. And for some time, it’s the international markets where Iben has found value.

Take South Korea. “A year ago, almost 20 percent of our portfolio was in South Korea,” he says. Remarkably, Iben notes that the country is still classified as an emerging market on Wall Street. After spending two weeks of meetings there in 2024, Iben came away thinking that the people running businesses are sharp, the culture is education-driven, and the infrastructure is strong. “It just didn’t feel like an emerging market at all.

Other investors are finally starting to…

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