Great Investors

We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Ed Wachenheim, chief executive and chairman of Greenhaven Associates, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from MOI Global’s archive of interviews and conference sessions and from the investor’s published work. We make these programs so that members can learn how a great investor thinks and works, through the decisions he made and what he said about them at the time. Your feedback on what was useful, and on which investors to cover next, shapes what we produce. We start with who he is:The introduction of Ed Wachenheim as a Latticework 2018 speaker took four lines. Williams College, then Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Three years at Goldman Sachs. Then Central National Corp, as an analyst and then as a portfolio manager. In 1987 he set up Greenhaven Associates on the family’s own money, and three years later took outside money, an amount he limited deliberately. The firm runs out of Purchase, New York, and has never published a letter. He is its chief executive and chairman, and he wrote Common Stocks and Common Sense. By April 2026 the firm had $12 billion under management.He wants to double his money, and he wants a reason for it that Wall Street has not already priced. He has no opinion on the market. Balance sheets come first, under an office rule that a firm makes its money off the income statement and survives off the balance sheet. He gave Graham & Doddsville the method in April 2026 in one sentence. “We project earnings two or three years out, put a multiple on them (16x or 16.5x for an average company, maybe 19x for an above-average company), and that is what the business is worth to us.”In the fall of 2025 he had thirty percent of the portfolio in homebuilders, and he told the room that thirty percent is the limit. General Motors, at ten percent, he calls a truck company. In 2011 he put a housing thesis into Home Depot, Lowe’s, Masco, Owens Corning, Lennox and Whirlpool, because the builders’ balance sheets were too weak to own. He bought Union Pacific late in 2003 and one airline, Southwest, which had as much cash as debt.The program opens in October 2025 with 45 percent in cash, which he called historic, and a market at about 28 times earnings. It follows the friend he met off the train on October 19, 1987, who had sold that day. It covers the 2014 letter asking Whirlpool’s chairman not to buy Indesit, and the sale around the start of 2023 after an acquisition put too much debt on the balance sheet. It has AIG, which he called the worst investment of his life in July 2016. In March 2020 he said he felt like a sailor lost in a fog, and that the firm had been net sellers until the day before. It ends with the Lennar walk to $315 a share and the tennis coach who told him to buy a ticket.He spoke at MOI’s Latticework summit in New York in the fall of 2018 and again in the fall of 2025. In 2018 he set out the hunter-gatherer thesis and worked Whirlpool to $300 a share. In 2025, asked whether a new technology justified a permanently higher multiple, he said he did not want to be the skunk at the picnic. MOI Global’s members also gather at the Best Ideas conference. John Mihaljevic, MOI Global’s chairman, opened a special online session on March 19, 2020. For more, see Ed Wachenheim: How a Contrarian Mindset Leads to Outperformance, which replays the 2018 conversation, and Latticework 2025: Ed Wachenheim on Homebuilders, which replays the 2025 session.The complete program runs sixty-nine minutes.Get the next program the day it comes out. The Great Investors podcast is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe there, or add the feed to any app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latticework.com/subscribe

We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Tom Russo, Managing Member of Gardner Russo & Quinn, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from MOI Global’s archive of interviews and conference sessions and from the investor’s published work. We make these programs so that members can learn how a great investor thinks and works, through the decisions he made and what he said about them at the time. Your feedback on what was useful, and on which investors to cover next, shapes what we produce. We start with who he is:Tom Russo grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, a General Motors town. His mother kept a globe on the dining room table. He read philosophy at Dartmouth, then went to Stanford, where in the early 1980s he found value investing and Warren Buffett came to his class. From Stanford he went to the Sequoia Fund in New York and to Bill Ruane. In 1989 he left New York for the Gardner firm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he is Managing Member of Gardner Russo & Quinn.The capacity to suffer, as he uses the phrase, belongs to the management and not to the investor. When a management spends the right amount to develop long-term competitive advantage, there are periods when the spending weighs on reported profits, and Wall Street likes smooth and predictable. He pairs it with the capacity to reinvest. The distinction came in his first sentence at the Latticework summit in December 2022: “…it’s not because you have to suffer, it’s because the company management must have the capacity to suffer.”Family control, for him, earns a premium rather than a discount. European family companies carried a lower multiple because of an overblown investor fear of mismanagement or self-dealing. In Heineken, which he first bought in 1986, his firm owned the control shares at a twenty percent discount to the same instrument. An example of reinvestment is Nespresso, which Nestlé kept supplied with capital for eleven years before it broke even. The price of patience is in his letters. In November 2022 he reported Semper Vic Partners down 23 percent for the first nine months of the year.The program opens at the summit in December 2022, where he reads his holdings by age rather than by weight. It follows the man in a Chicago club who ate lunch alone and owned the bear grease the railroads could not run without. It takes Heineken to Brazil, where Kirin outbid it for Schincariol at five billion dollars in 2011 and Heineken bought the business in 2017 for seven hundred and fifty million. It shows General Mills, which could have answered a yogurt startup for twelve million dollars and did not, and the startup became Chobani. It covers Weetabix, where the cash grew from 7 million pounds to over 105 million and Semper Vic, he wrote in October 2023, earned nearly 17 percent a year over fifteen years. It closes with the Stanford students who think of him as Mr. Weetabix.He gave the capacity-to-suffer talk at MOI’s Latticework summit in New York in December 2022 and opened the day there in October 2025. At Best Ideas Omaha in 2022 he presented Heineken and told that room a return of 11 to 15 percent over a long period can make a big difference.The complete program runs sixty-six minutes.Get the next program the day it comes out. The Great Investors podcast is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe there, or add the feed to any app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latticework.com/subscribe

This audio program is part of the Great Investors podcast, by Latticework.Murray Stahl grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in a household that spoke Yiddish and Russian. He went to Brooklyn College and joined Bankers Trust in 1978. He stayed sixteen years, working up investment strategies off the beaten path. He and Steven Bregman left the bank in the fall of 1994 to start Horizon Asset Management. Kinetics followed in 1996 and FRMO in 2001. He wrote with a ball point pen to slow his writing. He died on April 7, 2026.On his account, the indexes behind ETFs changed their calculation around 2006, from market cap to float, the shares in public hands. The index is price indifferent, with no price at which it stops buying. On a call in October 2016 he described what he looked for: “For us, a true alternative asset is a rare company that’s not likely to access the capital markets. Therefore, in the long run, the behavioral characteristics will be based on a certain scarcity value. That’s kind of what we’re looking for, scarcity value of a hard asset, encased in scarcity value of corporate structure.”An owner-operator, he said in 2018, is a company whose leaders own more equity than anyone else. Dormant assets, he said in October 2015, are potentially productive but dormant at the moment. Spin-offs he compared to expelling the worst student from a class: the average grade goes up, but the average student learned no more. The opportunity was with the parent. In late 2007 he launched a fund to own securities exchanges. In 2008 he could not find a single person who agreed with him. One royalty company he worked through had more reserves in its 2021 annual report than thirty years earlier.The program opens at the Best Ideas conference in January 2018. Near the end of that talk he said he had owned one stock since 1984 and bought more that day in his own account. It goes back to 1984, when he turned the wrong way out of a downtown elevator and read an unfamiliar name off a door. It follows the business plan he and Bregman made at a Burger King table in 1994, which put a ceiling on assets. In 2008 every investment he touched did poorly, and he did not blame his own analysis. It quotes the July 2010 letter telling shareholders he had begun designing indexes of his own. Its last section covers the quarterly call of March 3, 2026, on which he answered what he most regretted.He spoke at MOI Global’s Best Ideas conference in January 2018 and at the Latticework summit in September 2018. At Best Ideas he said he could not run a diversified portfolio and worked through Texas Pacific Land Trust. At Latticework he named companies one at a time, with his reasons for each, and withdrew the timing call he had made in April 2016. For more, see Replay of a Fireside Chat with the Legendary Investor at Latticework 2018.The program runs sixty-nine minutes.Get the next program the day it comes out. The Great Investors podcast is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe there, or add the feed to any app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latticework.com/subscribe

This audio program is part of the Great Investors podcast, by Latticework.Howard Marks has spent more than half a century on a problem he says he still has not solved: what risk actually is, and what an investor can do about it. His career runs from equity research in the late 1960s, through the launch of Citibank’s convertible and high-yield bond funds in 1978, into distressed debt in 1988, and on to the firm he co-founded in 1995. Through all of it he has written memos to anyone willing to read him.One of the recurring lessons in Howard’s work is that knowing where a market is going and knowing where it stands are entirely different problems, and only the second one is solvable. He is unusually willing to say so plainly. Asked at a Latticework summit what he was still curious about, he named the subject he is best known for: “In investing, the greatest puzzle for me is risk, how we should think about it, and how we can work with it.”That idea runs through this audio program. It traces Howard’s early years as an analyst and the three lessons he took from them; the 1978 telephone call that sent him into a market with a bad name and no data; the first memo he ever published, in October 1990, written five years before Oaktree existed and already containing the sentence the firm would be built on; the decade he wrote without receiving virtually a single reply; the memo he published three days after Lehman failed; and the argument with his son Andrew that revised part of his own framework fifty years into his career.We are grateful to Howard for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community over the years, at Latticework summits, at Best Ideas, and in conversation during the crisis of 2020. He has spoken with unusual candor about what cannot be known, about the difference between controlling risk and avoiding it, and about the discipline of daring to look wrong for as long as it takes to be proved right.Our hope is that this special episode, Howard Marks: Higher-Level Thinking, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Howard’s approach. It is a program about risk, but also about writing, temperament, and the willingness to keep an important question open for fifty years rather than pretend it has been settled.For those willing to think at the second level, the lesson is not that the future can be read. It is that knowing where you stand, and sizing your positions accordingly, remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latticework.com/subscribe

This audio program is part of the Great Investors podcast, by Latticework.Bob Robotti has spent decades doing the kind of investing that is easy to describe but hard to practice: looking carefully where others are not looking, studying unfashionable businesses, distinguishing temporary difficulty from permanent impairment, and waiting patiently for value to surface. His career has unfolded across deep-value securities, cyclical industries, energy, housing, shipping, board service, and active ownership. Through it all, he has remained unusually committed to the bottom-up work of understanding real-life businesses.One of the recurring lessons in Bob’s work is that investing is not an abstract exercise. It is not enough to say that an industry is cyclical, a stock is cheap, or the market is wrong. The real work is in understanding the business, the balance sheet, the capital cycle, the incentives, the industry structure, and the people making decisions. As Bob has put it, “There are no universals. There are only specifics.”That idea runs through this program. It traces Bob’s early exposure to Tweedy, Browne, Walter Schloss, Joe Reilly, and Mario Gabelli; his founding of Robotti & Company; his development as a value investor in overlooked and capital-intensive sectors; and his long study of how markets misprice businesses when fear, institutional constraints, or short-term thinking obscure normalized earnings power.We are deeply grateful to Bob for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community and the broader investment community over the years. His willingness to explain not only what he has done, but how he thinks, has made him an important teacher for intelligent investors. He has spoken with unusual candor about mistakes, cycles, patience, active ownership, and the emotional discipline required to stay with an investment when the market disagrees.Our hope is that this special episode, Bob Robotti: Turning Over Rocks, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Bob’s approach. It is a program about value investing, but also about apprenticeship, temperament, independent judgment, and the enduring importance of doing the work.For those willing to turn over enough rocks, the lesson is not merely that bargains exist. It is that the act of looking carefully, patiently, and specifically remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages.We are delighted to announce Bob Robotti as a featured speaker/panelist at the Latticework 2026 summit, to be held in Chicago on November 10-11. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latticework.com/subscribe