On March 10, 2021, International Value Advisers, or IVA, quietly submitted a shocking document to the SEC. There was no accompanying press release or letter to shareholders just a terse announcement that the firm planned to liquidate its two mutual funds in short order. To prepare, both strategies would immediately start selling all the holdings in their portfolios, so that they’d only own cash and cash-like instruments until the liquidation date which was only a month away. No reason was given.
That wasn’t all. The document stated that after the funds were liquidated, IVA itself would close down.
A day or two later, most of the firm’s personnel, including all but one of its seven analysts, had disappeared from the IVA website. No further information was provided.