When Kent Gasaway travels to Europe with his family, he purchases high-quality paintings from unknown regional artists, not with the intent of selling but rather to buy and hold.

"My wife and I try to pick up art every time we travel, which reminds us of the places we've been," says Gasaway, who in addition to co-managing Buffalo mutual funds also is a registered investment advisor and manages portfolios for individual clients. "We go to a lot of galleries when we travel internationally in countries such as Italy, France, Spain and the UK."

His favorite painting is the portrayal of a herd of buffalo that hangs from the wall in his office, which he purchased in Jackson, Wyo.

"Art collecting fits what we like to do as a family. I don't' keep track of what they're worth. We just enjoy the paintings," he said.

Like his approach to art, Gasaway tends to own companies for a long time in the mutual funds he co-manages, which include Buffalo Small Cap (BUFSX), Buffalo Mid Cap and Buffalo Growth (BUFGX).

"We try to hold companies for a long period of time because that is how you create wealth. In a perfect world, we'd like to own great companies forever, but in most cases eventually you have to sell or trim when the price gets unsustainably high," says Gasaway.

The avid art collector started in the financial industry in 1982 investing in government bonds, agencies and mortgage backed securities. He then switched to equities and became an analyst in 1987.

"I subsequently became a fixed-income and equity fund portfolio manager. My diversity and breadth of knowledge make me stand out," said Gasaway, who is a former member of Mission's financial planning society.

The 52-year-old entered the mutual fund industry in 1994 with $25 million in Buffalo's Flexible Income fund (BUFBX).  Today, the fund has $600 million in assets.

"Diversification is limited in individual securities, so we set up a pooled vehicle to handle our client's investments because they would come to us with an IRA rollover that was sizable or their kids' education account containing $20,000," Gasaway says.

As of yesterday, Buffalo Small Cap returned 17.49 percent year-to-date compared with 8.97 percent for the Buffalo Mid Cap and 15.95 percent for the Buffalo Growth fund, according to Yahoo Finance.

But Buffalo's flagship small-cap fund (BUFSX) is closed to new investors. "If we continued to take more money, it would get difficult to maintain the right balance of stocks and type of companies and the fund would begin to drift into the mid-cap growth space," says Gasaway. "We don't think it is right to keep growing assets in a small-cap fund."

The Buffalo mid-cap fund was launched to catch the overflow of companies that had outgrown the firm's small-cap fund. "We had great success with the small-cap fund focusing on our sweet spot of $1 to $1.5 billion market-cap companies. However, we didn't want to lose touch with companies just because they grew above our $2.5 billion market-cap limitation," said Gasaway. "With the Buffalo mid-cap fund, we have been able to take our great companies out of small cap and let them continue to grow in the mid-cap fund."

Buffalo's growth fund specializes in U.S.-based companies that secure a growing percentage of their business internationally. "We start our investment process looking for long-term trends that are driving growth for companies. For example, eBay and Facebook have valuable networks that create shareholder value," says Gasaway. "These companies were first movers in their respective industries and have built large market share."

-Juliette Fairley