Paul Black
Portfolio Manager & Co-CEO, WCM Investment Management. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutivewcminvest.com ↗
Paul Black joined WCM Investment Management in 1989 and helped guide its growth into a global equity manager with over $100 billion in assets. He developed WCM's investment framework, which focuses on expanding economic moats and corporate culture.
1shows
3appearances
39statements
6resolved
5supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
65said about them ↓ Everything Paul Black said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Black: Buying wide-moat businesses cheaply is flawed today
“That whole notion, and we've talked about this before of buying wide moat businesses cheaply, I think is flawed today because everybody's trying to do the same thing.”
Black: Competitive advantage trajectory matters more than static moat size
“We began to wrestle with that whole idea of what is important with a competitive advantage, and part of that was it wasn't about the absolute size, it was about the direction of that competitive advantage.”
Black: Debt-financed founder buyouts ruin asset management firm succession
“The firms that have failed have been the ones that have taken on massive amounts of debt in order to finance the buyout of the founder, and that's fine as long as everything's going well, but when it's not, inevitably the younger people who have all the debt t…”
Black: Asset management succession requires founders to accept a significant haircut
“What we concluded is the best way to transition wealth is the founders have to be generous. The founders ultimately have to take a significant haircut in order to make sure that the company continues to prosper.”
Black: Investing in expanding moats makes initial valuations look cheap
“And what we learned because of our mistakes of significantly underperforming the market is you've got to stay focused on the direction of the competitive advantage because everybody's business, I don't care who it is, every organization, you're either getting …”
Black: WCM built around weak performers multiple times over twenty years
“I can tell you that in the last 20 years, I've probably done that Seven or eight times where I've just built around somebody that was weak, as long as Mike said, they weren't toxic to the culture.”
WCM to sunset retiring founder Kurt Winrich's 20% stake over seven years
“So we've chosen to basically sunset Kurt. That means for the next seven years, he will receive his dividend every year for the next seven years. And then that will retire into treasury and it'll be accreted to everybody else.”
Black: Asset managers should focus on business culture over DCF models
“Our business worships At the modeling of discounted cash flows on businesses, and everyone thinks the magic is in the DCF, and very, very little of the magic is there. That's just a tool, and that tool's only as good as the input. So, from my perspective, I th…”
Black: WCM did under 2% of typical due diligence on Clifford Capital
“It's probably less than two percent of the work that most people do on our firm. As I said, like them, passionate, good track record, probably high probability of success going forward.”
Black: The competitive edge of crunching numbers no longer exists
“And that's one of the lessons I think that I've learned over the last 30 years is the competitive advantage of just crunching numbers doesn't exist anymore. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago it did, but not today.”
Black: Buying cheap wide-moat businesses often leads to value traps
“I think one of the reasons that active managers underperform consistently is because everybody's doing the same thing.
They're all approaching the market from the same perspective.
What we have found is more times than not, if you're just looking for high qual…”
Black: 5-year ROIC trajectory correlates directly with stock performance quintiles
“There is a one-to-one correlation between the direction of the ROIC over a five-year period of time and stock performance. You know, so if you break the market down into five quintiles from the top quintile where they have the most rapidly rising ROICs to the …”
Black: Expanding low-ROIC firms outperform stagnant high-ROIC companies
“We prefer a company, frankly, that would have maybe five years ago had a four percent ROIC growing to five, six, seven, eight. That's a much better investment. Than a company that's at a 12% ROIC that might be stagnant over that period of time and not growing.”
Black: Outsourced R&D businesses deserve premium valuation multiples
“If you think in terms of it being an outsourced R&D company, our argument would be those types of businesses deserve higher multiples, because what they ultimately do, they start at the low end, they're a very low cost part of the process, but then they kind o…”
Black: DCF models provide zero competitive advantage for investors
“Most people spend 95% of their time crunching numbers, running DCF models, which by the way, has zero competitive advantage, because you have thousands upon thousands of people doing the same work.”
Black: 50% of 2,000 active managers beat their benchmark over 10 years
“So we looked at all active managers in the database. There were 2000 that had at least a 10 year track record. And of those 2000, 50% of them beat their respective markets, whether it's EM, small cap, bonds.”
Black: Most active managers run 100-stock portfolios to protect assets
“For the most part, managers don't do anything different to justify an active management fee. Most managers are all about protecting their assets. So they're going to run a hundred stock portfolio. They're going to buy the high quality, wide mode business selli…”
Black: Evaluating competitive advantages is fundamentally qualitative, not quantitative
“Kurt came from an engineering background, so he was trying to quantify a subjective process, and he saw everything through numbers, and if you ask Kurt now, he'd say, even though I'm an engineer and I get numbers, and it's not about that, the competitive advan…”
Black: Cross-Shareholdings and Opaque Cultures Make Japan Hard for Growth Investing
“You know, there's a lot of, you know, you still have the cross ownership of shares. You know, you still have a very paternalistic society and paternalistic companies. They're not very transparent, so it's very difficult for us to find names for that reason in …”
Black: Balanced Executive Pay Outside the U.S. Benefits Shareholders
“I think it's great that outside the U.S., you don't see guys making 30 or forty million dollars while their CFO makes 500,000. You just don't see that. You see a lot more reasonable equity payouts and or salary payouts in those companies, which I like a lot, b…”
Black: Practices Seen as Under the Table Are Normal in Emerging Markets
“Emerging economies, They operate a little differently than a lot of European and North American countries. And things that we would see as being kind of under the table are just normal.”
Black: Multi-billion dollar momentum shops from past decades no longer exist
“How many years ago, 1520 years ago, there were a bunch of multi-billion dollar momentum shops and I can't I can't really think of one right now that is still in existence.”
Black: Allocators Chase Past Returns Instead of Rebalancing Into Lagging Strategies
“Most individuals still chase money. They still chase performance. We tell them all the time, look, if we've done particularly well, we completely understand you taking money away from us and why don't you put it into a, you know, a strategy, like maybe a value…”
The other half of the tape: Paul Black's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 64 times in 9 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sloan Payne 24Ted Seides 22Mike Trigg 7Sanjay Ayer 5Jim Falbe 5Marcel van der Hoef 1
Statements about Paul Black, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 64
2026 24 mentions in 1 episode
2025 3 mentions in 1 episode
2024 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2023 5 mentions in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 20 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Paul's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Portfolio Manager & Co-CEO, WCM Investment Management | 3 | 39 | 83% 5/6 | full record on Capital Allocators → |