Exclusive: Southeastern had eyed joining Dell buyout group-sources Managers at Alpine Capital Research in St Louis, who have said they would vote their 2 million shares against the buyout, praised Southeastern, which manages the Longleaf family of funds, for sticking up for shareholders in the January talks. "Looks positive to me," said Willem Schilpzand, an associate portfolio manager. Sounds like Longleaf is fighting for the public leverage recap (where all shareholders stay in) or the option for shareholders to opt in to a going private deal. Either way, it looks like we would have the option of participating or not. That is all we can really ask for," Schilpzand said. He has not disclosed the size of his stake, but CNBC reported on March 6 that he owned about 100 million shares, or 6 percent of Dell. Some analysts and rival fund managers say Southeastern's activism is a sign the fund is feeling pressure to perform, after losses in the aftermath of the financial crisis marred an otherwise strong track record. Hawkins and Cates often say they succeed by being right 60 percent of the time. Now they have to convince other Dell shareholders that this particular case does not count among the other 40 percent -- when they're wrong. Longleaf boasts a strong record, helped by outperformance in the first bear market of the 2000s. It gained an average of 6.55 percent a year over the past 15, beating the Standard & Poor's 500 Index by more than two percentage points a year and coming in ahead of 91 percent of similar funds, according to data from Lipper, a unit of Thomson Reuters. But it stumbled through the financial crisis, losing over 50 percent of its value in 2008 versus S&P's 37 percent decline. When Southeastern first bought into Dell in 2005 in the mid-$30s range, the firm crowed to investors in an annual report that it was paying "fire-sale prices." Dell is now trading at less than half that. The firm has used activism rarely and only as the last resort after an initial investment has gone wrong. It has gotten involved as an activist 25 times in 23 U.S. companies since 1996. Dell is the largest company it has so far taken on, nearly double the value of second-ranked Chesapeake Energy Corp, according to FactSet's SharkRepellent research service. Last year, it lobbied for changes at Chesapeake after a series of Reuters reports that CEO Aubrey McClendon had been borrowing from a lender who was also a big source of funding to the company. McClendon left the company this year but Southeastern was left with an estimated loss of $300 million to $400 million on its $2.3 billion original investment. Financial adviser Peter Gellman in Highland Park, New Jersey, who has for years invested in Longleaf, said all value investors "have some black spots on their record." "No one is perfect," said Gellman, who supports the firm's stance with Dell. They will get active when they judge it appropriate - they're not hyper-active. Reporting by Nadia Damouni in New York and Aaron Pressman in Boston; additional reporting by Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; Editing by Soyoung Kim, Tiffany Wu and Ken Wills