Legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham has never been part of the cool crowd.

The strident contrarian was stubborn enough to stick to his guns when the dot-com bubble was inflating — repeating his value mantra even as 40 percent of his business walked out the door because he refused to buy technology growth stocks. So, he certainly wasn’t going to alter his course during the cataclysmic market meltdown of 2008.

And in fact, he didn’t have to. This time there was little pressure for the 71-year-old chief investment strategist of Boston-based Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo to abandon his method of searching out underpriced stocks with strong fundamentals. Impressed by his call on the tech bubble and his loyalty to the value religion, investors have been flocking to GMO. The firm’s assets shot up to $150 billion in 2005 and eventually settled at about $100 billion today. “You make money by...