The fund, which owned no banks as of June 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, has avoided the group because there is a "high risk of bad things occurring," Kieffer said.

Yacktman, whose $3.7 billion Focused Fund owned shares of Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp. and New York-based Bank of New York Mellon Corp. as of Sept. 30, has shunned most large banks because they're difficult to analyze, he said.

"They create assets with a stroke of a pen and it takes five years to find out how good the assets are," Yacktman, 70, said in a phone interview from Austin, Texas.

Top Two Spots

Yacktman Focused rose 5.2 percent in 2011, better than 96 percent of large-cap value funds, Morningstar data show. Over 10 years it returned 13 percent annually, the best showing among more than 500 comparable funds. The firm's flagship Yacktman Fund ranks second with an average gain of 12 percent.

Yacktman has used the same method to evaluate stocks since opening the Focused fund in 1997. He estimates how much cash a company will produce relative to what he has to pay for it per share. Macroeconomic issues are "fun to talk about" while offering little use in deciding which stocks to own because forecasting the economy's future is too difficult, he said.

Yacktman's approach hurt him in the late 1990s when he refused to buy technology stocks he considered overpriced. The fund lost 22 percent in 1999, compared with a gain of 21 percent for the S&P 500 Index.

Two tech names, Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., are among the fund's biggest holdings today.

'Would Have Laughed'

"If someone had told me 10 years ago that these stocks would be in my portfolio I would have laughed," Yacktman said.

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