After a four-month hiatus, Larry Sarbit is back and looking for bargains.

Mostly recently a senior vice president and portfolio manager at AIC Ltd., Sarbit is venturing out on his own with Sarbit Asset Management Inc., which officially opens for business today.

“This is something I’ve dreamed about for a long time,” he says.

Sarbit, who managed more than $2 billion in AIC’s American Focused Fund until resigning in April, is launching his own fund as well, called the Sarbit US Equity Trust. He says the fund will build upon his quarter-century of experience in value investing, gleaned during stints at Investors Group and Richardson Greenshields.

The fund will be available from brokers and financial planners across the country. When the demand is sufficient and he feels he has the expertise available, he will expand his fund offering, he says.

“We’re looking for train wrecks,” he says. “(Public) companies where something has gone wrong but their underlying fundamental value hasn’t been changed. They’re usually quite unpopular — negative things are being written about them, people are selling the stocks and analysts are negative — and people are overcompensating for the problem that has occurred,” he says.

But even though Sarbit had a substantial following during his previous stops, that doesn’t mean he’ll be swamped with client assets to his new company, says Dan Richards, president of Strategic Imperatives, a Toronto-based consulting firm to the financial services industry.

“He’s going to have some uphill sledding ahead of him. The problem with only having one fund is if that doesn’t work out, where do you go?” he says.

He says smaller shops simply don’t have the marketing budgets or resources that larger ones do.

“To crowbar your way onto (an advisor’s product) shelf is not an easy proposition for anybody, much less a one-man band,” he says.

Sarbit, who has long favoured living in Winnipeg to be away from the “noise” created by others in the industry, has taken his desire to be away from the hustle and bustle one step further with his new digs — located on the main floor of an apartment complex overlooking the Assiniboine River, a five-minute drive from downtown.

“Now we’re away from the noise of Winnipeg,” he says of his 5,000-square-foot space. “In Toronto, this space would cost me a fortune and I’d be surrounded by too many people with too many opinions — most of them wrong,” he says.