Cooke & Bieler 13F (2026 Q1): A Diffuse Value Book

A Philadelphia value boutique with a long memory

Cooke & Bieler has been practicing fundamental value investing out of Philadelphia since the middle of the last century, and its 2026Q1 13F reflects the patience and breadth of a long-established research shop. The filing shows about $8.84 billion across roughly 103 positions, and the weighting is deliberately diffuse: the largest holding, Gildan Activewear, is just 3.98% of reported value, and the rest of the top ten sits between 2% and 3%. This is a manager spreading conviction across many mid-cap and large-cap names rather than betting heavily on a few, the hallmark of a relative-value approach grounded in bottom-up research.

An unusually heavy bet on specialty insurance

What stands out in the top of the book is a striking cluster of property-and-specialty insurers. RenaissanceRe, White Mountains, Arch Capital, and Fidelity National Financial all rank among the larger positions, an unusual concentration in a single corner of the financial sector. Specialty insurance is a classic value-investor hunting ground: well-run underwriters compound book value over time, the businesses are often misunderstood or undervalued by the broader market, and disciplined firms can earn high returns through cycles. Cooke & Bieler's lineup, spanning reinsurance, insurance holding companies, and title insurance, reads like a considered, research-driven bet on that thesis.

Beyond insurance, the book mixes in Crown Castle, RB Global, Becton Dickinson, and Labcorp, a spread across communications infrastructure, industrials, and healthcare that gives the portfolio broad sector reach beneath its diffuse surface.

Trimming the insurers, adding a new industrial

The quarter's activity shows the firm taking something off its insurance cluster while adding elsewhere. It trimmed RenaissanceRe by 23% of shares and Arch Capital by 15%, with smaller cuts to Fidelity National and Gildan, and established a new position in Sunbelt Rentals. Reducing several insurers at once, after a strong run for the group, looks like valuation discipline, harvesting gains where the relative-value case has narrowed, while the new Sunbelt stake adds equipment-rental exposure tied to construction and industrial activity. Reported value eased about 7.8% on the quarter and has drifted down from roughly $10 billion two years ago to $8.84 billion now, a gentle decline consistent with that trimming plus ordinary market movement rather than any abrupt shift.

How to read a diffuse value book

With more than a hundred positions and no single name above 4%, Cooke & Bieler's filing is not about any one stock; it is about the pattern. The signal lives in the sector clusters, like that heavy insurance weighting, and in the direction of the share-count changes, which this quarter point to profit-taking in insurers and a fresh industrial addition. For investors mining filings for ideas, a diffuse research-driven book like this is most useful as a map of where a disciplined value team currently finds clusters of opportunity, rather than as a list of high-conviction single bets.

You can explore the full holdings, the position changes, and the longer history on the Cooke & Bieler filer page.