Insight
Trigg: Hiring a head of HR leads leaders to outsource vital duties
“When you hire someone to be the head of HR, what do you do? You start outsourcing, I think, very important duties as a leader. You know, if I suddenly need to let somebody go, I'm not going to go do that. Or if I do have a difficult conversation with somebody …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Trigg: Moat trajectory investing may lose its edge within 10 years
“To some extent, motor trajectory may not be the significant advantage 10 years from now that it was 10 years ago.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Trigg: WCM Used Paper Ballots From All Staff for Investment Committee Consensus
“Every single person in the room, I mean, you could be in operations, you could have been in sales. I mean, everybody wrote down on a piece of paper what they thought we should do with the next trade in the portfolio. And then all those votes were tallied up an…”
Insight
Trigg: Alpha Exists in the Gap Between Market Fade Expectations and Reality
“And it's that delta between what the market's expectations for the fade are and when they actually takes place is where all that alpha generation opportunity exists.”
Insight
Trigg: AI Summarization and Report-Writing Offer Zero Competitive Edge
“All the other stuff that you hear about and people talk about around writing reports and Summarizing, that's all permission to play off the shelf stuff. There's no edge there. There's no competitive advantage in trying to think too deeply about any of those th…”
Assertion Partly supported
Trigg: WCM's First Private Investment Was Anduril at an $8B Valuation
“Our first investment was in Andrel at an eight billion dollar valuation. We were also the first crossover fund to invest in Andrel.”
Insight
Trigg: Framing colleagues as friends increases accountability rather than lowering standards
“In fact, I have always said that a group of friends, some people have said, well, if you're all friends, nobody's going to want to hold each other accountable. And you're going to just be having fun all day and messing around. And I said, it's actually the exa…”
Insight
Trigg: Caring more than competitors is asset managers' best competitive edge
“We're not smarter than anyone else, and we're not going to work harder than anyone else either, but we have to care more than anyone else. That's our best chance. We have to care more, and that's the types of people that are typically attracted to this industr…”
What-if
Trigg: Buying Dell and Yahoo over Apple and Google damaged WCM
“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”
Insight
Trigg: Four criteria define durable economic moats in outsourcing businesses
“The first thing we would look for is we want a runway of outsourcing. You don't want to invest in outsourcers when the majority of the market has already been outsourced. And that can take a really long time to be honest with you. These things are actually pre…”
Insight
Trigg: Enduring luxury compounders require ultra-high pricing and direct distribution
“And we studied about 50 luxury companies over the course of 30 years and tried to find What were the markings of the ones that really compounded returns at really high rates for a long period? I'm not the ones that, you know, sure, there's many of them that ha…”
Insight
Trigg: Precise DCF Valuation Is Ineffective for Dynamic Growth Companies
“For one, I've learned that it's just ridiculous to think that you can precisely determine what a company's worth. I mean, things are changing constantly, and particularly if you're investing in companies that are in growing industries with moats that are growi…”
Insight
Trigg: Moat and Culture Durability Outperforms Short-Term Value Investing
“Focusing on The qualitative assessments of a business around moats and culture and how that translates into the durability of a company's growth rate. I think that is far more predictive of a successful investment than trying to find things waiting for price b…”
Insight
Trigg: Active management struggles because career risk drives groupthink and benchmark-hugging
“I think these really counterproductive behaviors that largely explain why active management struggles, and it's a lot of group think. People are worried about standing out from the crowd. They're worried about careers. So they play it safe. They hug the benchm…”
Insight
Trigg: Long Bull Markets Tempt Asset Managers to Over-Concentrate Research
“When you go through a lawn bull market, like you did up to 20, 22, it's easy to focus your energy and resources around things that are doing really well. With the benefit of hindsight, after 10 years, you could maybe have looked back at the focus list and said…”
Disclosure
Trigg: WCM analysts initially rejected the moat trajectory investment framework
“There was a moment years ago when we were trying to go all in on this concept of mode trajectory and pattern recognition. And several of the analysts at the time were questioning whether this was the right thing to do. And most of the people in the room said, …”
Opinion
Trigg: Aerospace and Turbine Post-COVID Trades Are Far From Done
“I think that we still believe that there's pretty significant tailwind to go, and it's, these trades are far from done.”
Disclosure
Trigg: WCM Co-Led Two Databricks Rounds and Invested in Anthropic
“Fast forward, we got an amazing opportunity to co-lead two rounds with Databricks. We were just involved with the Anthropic raised.”
Insight
Trigg: Culture Analysis Must Assess Social Reinforcement, Not Just Stated Behaviors
“You can have two, three, five companies that talk about the exact same behaviors, whether it's lean or the Danaher business system. All these companies are talking about the exact same behaviors, but maybe they don't have the right social reinforcement mechani…”
Insight
Trigg: Long feedback loops drive groupthink and career risk in asset management
“We talked about the long feedback loops and investment management and how that leads to a set of suboptimal behaviors. A lot of groupthink, a lot of fear of failure or career risk, and so people, as a result, are afraid to stand out or do something different, …”
Insight
Trigg: Employees usually signal when a colleague must be fired
“The reality is, nine out of 10 times, your people tell you that that needs to get done before you actually have to make that decision yourself”
Insight
Trigg: Writing clarity is a key tool for effective investing
“And I still, to this day, think being a good writer is a really great tool to being a good investor. It's important to be able to, I think, articulate how you're thinking about things. It's important to Be able to simplify your ideas down to a few key principl…”
Assertion Supported
Trigg: WCM's AUM dropped from $4B to under $1B by 2010
“By the time 2010 came, we had gone from four billion when I started to a little under a billion dollars in assets.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Trigg: Data-driven culture analysis via ESG will become a major differentiator
“The next big foray for us and things we're spending a lot of time on now is more data oriented culture work. And I think that's going to become a source of meaningful differentiation. And some of that's being enabled by a lot of the work that's going on in the…”
