The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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 …”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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, …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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, …”
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”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Trigg: It takes over a decade to evaluate true investor skill
“You know, it can take 10 years or longer to know if somebody's actually a really great investor. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of luck involved.”
Mike Trigg: Investment analysts must generate unique insights, not just gather information
“Ultimately we're paid and we're supposed to be making unique insights. And so people that just are more information gatherers, as opposed to making insights, that tends to be a pet peeve of mine as well.”
Trigg: Many Fund Managers Fail to Adapt Their Investment Processes
“Our perspective on that was that a lot of people in this industry don't believe in this notion of adaptation and evolution of an investment process.”
Trigg: WCM Built Custom Taxonomies to Replace Standard GICS Classifications
“And coming out of that period, we basically created a hundred different categories across about 700 companies.”
Trigg: WCM is launching internal Artist Studio R&D lab for alpha
“We have a something now called the WCM Artist Studio, which is effectively an R&D lab that we're building inside the research team that's going to spend a lot of time exploring those New fields of compounding knowledge to see if there's new sources of alpha th…”
Trigg: WCM hired an analyst recruited from an anonymous Twitter account
“We hired somebody two years ago that we actually originally found on Twitter. He had a Twitter handle under a fake name. He was someone that we followed, we liked. It was very much, in a way, Paul's experience with me in the newsletter, just saying things that…”
Trigg: WCM Underperformed by Over 2,000 Basis Points in Five Quarters
“We're underperformed by over 2000 basis points in the first five quarters that I joined the firm.”
Trigg: WCM International Outperformed by 900 Bps Annually for Six Years
“I think we outperformed by 900 basis points annually in the first six years of the product, and it still took us that long to get to a hundred million dollars.”
Trigg: Clinical trials and pharma manufacturing are well under 50% outsourced
“Even in some of the other industries that we're involved in today, things like outsource clinical trials or outsource pharma manufacturing, you're looking still at well under 50% of those markets being outsourced.”
Mike Trigg: David Moorhead's due diligence at Baylor is completely unique
“David Moorhead at Baylor is somebody that I have a lot of respect for as a person, and I think he does things really differently. His due diligence is unlike one we've ever really had, and then the way he's kind of monitored his investment in the firm has also…”