YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Nygren

lines on the record: 121
first: 2025-06-22
most recent: 2025-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's been a great process that lots of people have worked on tweaking so that it continues to be great. And I can't stress enough, this wouldn't have been possible without the team around me. I mean, one of my, you know, I'm a baseball fan. One of my favorite quotes is a Casey Stengel quote that says, managers get paid for home runs other people hit. That's just as true of portfolio managers as it is and baseball managers, that it's very difficult to be a one-man show and be successful for any extended period of time. I think you see that in a lot of the people who have kind of picked one environment that they've done really well in, and then you go back and revisit and the arc of their career has not been as successful as that one time period would have suggested.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To succeed more than value investors succeed. You not only have to believe it maintains this unprecedented level of concentration, but that it grows. And to me, that's almost a bet against capitalism. Capitalism says high returns will draw competition and it will force companies and industries back to fair levels of pricing. to make a bet that a tiny handful of companies that have grown incredibly well for the past 25 years are going to continue that kind of growth for the next 25 years. It's kind of a bet that capitalism didn't work. And I'm not going to make that bet.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as they get bigger and bigger, it's harder and harder for them to maintain the abnormally high growth rates that they've had. I don't think we've ever seen a time in history where companies, the size of Amazon, Meta, basically the Mag7 stocks re-accelerated growth as they got larger. And in a sense, to believe that growth investing is going to succeed at the expense of value investing for the next decade, you have to believe that continues. And we're starting at a level where we've never seen such issue-specific or industry-specific concentration in the S&P 500. It's effectively become a concentrated mega cap growth fund. And for that fund to”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think, you know, early in my career, we talked about like a three-year growth value cycle that got to five. The idea that value would be out of favor for a decade is something that was never something we envisioned back in the 80s or 90s. But when you look at why it's been out of favor, one thing that most value investors will cite very quickly is how much more important momentum is to so many investors' processes today. And I think that's true. But equally important has been the acceleration of growth that we've seen in very, very large companies. We are part of what value investing depends on is that the most successful companies today, because they have such high returns on capital, are going to invite competition.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Journey didn't end the day they graduated from school. And that if you're going to stay successful at this business next year, you have to be smarter than you were this year. And just that pursuit of knowledge, knowing that it's a necessary but not sufficient part of success in the business is also really, really important.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As information becomes easy to access and is therefore ubiquitous, it stops having its ability to add value. So our approach has had to evolve kind of to stay ahead of what you could computerize. When I started just buying low PE stocks or low price to bookstocks and being patient was a winning formula. There are some value managers that still try to do that and the results haven't been pretty. First, you can replicate them at almost no cost with a value factor fund. But second, it's not that effective anymore. So I think trying to make sure that your process is staying ahead of what can be done passively is also a very important part of our success. And just being around people that know the learning.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a discipline that everyone on the team buys into and having everyone on the team believe that if the team is successful, that's their personal path to how it will be most economically beneficial to them as an individual. I think the other thing you look at that has made Harris Oakmark successful is you look at how we've evolved over the 40 years. 40 years ago We used to have a mad rush toward the monthly S&P stock guides that would come into the office or once a month we paid to have a value line screen come in that would rank order the 1,500 value line companies based on their PE ratio. I mean you take it for granted today that that information is very very easy to access but what happens is”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or get away from the presentation book and just have a conversation about what motivates them, what's helped them to succeed. So I think those are some of the things that people can do to try to learn from others that have been successful in their field or other fields.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If that's something we could incorporate in our process, or what made athletic teams or certain athletes so successful, what did they do that the rest of the highly performing players didn't do? What allowed them to get to that next level? Same thing with people who started businesses. So yes, it's great to have the relationships with individuals, but I think you could also learn a lot from podcasts. I love the series that How Leaders Lead, David Novak, the ex-CEO from Yum Brands, Yum had been a very successful holding of ours for a number of years, got to know David really well. I think he does an amazing job of interviewing these high-performing CEOs and getting them to talk about things like we discussed earlier.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've got interesting ideas on nutrition or how different sports teams have succeeded, what's going on in politics. I think one of the mistakes that you often see value investors making is because Warren Buffett is such a good mentor and role model, even to those of us who've never met him. You just read every book about Warren Buffett that you possibly can. And people are on their 10th or 12th Buffett book and they know what he eats for breakfast. And all these aspects of his life that have nothing to do with his success, I love reading about people who succeeded in the investment world who weren't value investors. Takes me a little out of my comfort zone, but every once in a while you read about something they did, like what Michael Steinhardt did, that you say, wait a minute.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're able to perpetuate that through the various age groups at Harris where I've got an environment now where there are people from 60 years old to 25 years old that I'm anxious to talk to because they're smart on topics that I'm not nearly as smart as they are. And I think that's one of the reasons that I still enjoy coming into work so much and why I hated those weeks during the pandemic was I really enjoy being surrounded by high performing, really bright people. And, you know, it's not just the discussions that we have about the investment portfolio, the stock market today. But when you're around smart people,”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's different than the advice you would get that Charlie Munger gave throughout his life that Warren Buffett gives. Part of it that's just good luck that I've been very privileged that people who knew a ton more about investing than I did were willing to give their time to help teach me at ages in my life where that was important. But I think part of it is also it's your decision of who you want to partner with, who firm you're going to work at. I'm the longest tenured person at Harris now, so there is no one here that was here when I joined Harris, but through always trying to hire people that are ethical and hard work.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did all of the other scholarship money that they can get? And then we top that off to a level that makes the collegiate dream achievable for them. And of all the things that I've worked on, that's the one that I'm most proud of. My partner Maggie has started a charity in Chicago called Strides for Peace that tries to work. What I would say at a venture capital level with community organizations that are doing things to reduce gun violence. That's been another important aspect of our foundation. And a lot of those activities involve putting the kids on a path toward education, valuing education, and making sure that doors are open. them as they climb their way through elementary school and eventually high school and onto college if that's what they want to do.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we set up scholarship funds for kids in the county that we live in who have achieved academic excellence despite the challenges that they've had to overcome. Because when you look at an underprivileged kid today, first generation, they might get to within $10,000 or so of non-academic scholarships and other loans or gifts. But to tell somebody in that position that you're going to have to pay $10,000 more than what can be provided for you, you might as well be telling them a million dollars because the idea that they could actually get the extra $10,000 is impossible. So we do what we call a first generation last dollar scholarship where these academically successful students”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go through a four year college. So I kind of have a special spot for kids that are growing up in families that are more economically challenged, that are finding ways to overcome that and still achieving a lot academically. I would say the favorite foundation activity that I have right now is something we call New Future Scholarship. I live in southwest Michigan. I commute back and forth to Chicago for work Monday through Thursday. But in the southwest Michigan commuter, you've got a lot of first”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think I've been fortunate enough in my life to not give back something would in some ways it would devalue what I've accomplished in my career. I had advantages that a lot of kids don't have, even though I grew up in a middle-class family. It was a family that cared that their kids had incredibly strong work ethic. It was parents that wanted to teach at home. I went through public schools, but kind of like learning didn't stop when I walked in the door after school. And my grandparents on both sides, one of them immigrated. So it's not a, you know, it's not like sixth generation or something. My dad was the first one in his family.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something I enjoy doing. I'd been effective at it. And as long as I can do that and help give the environment at Harris Oakmark to help the younger generation be set up for success, it's something I want to keep doing.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retired after they had as much money as they thought they would need for retirement. And the pattern is always the same. One or two months into retirement, they're saying, this is the best thing ever. You should be doing this. You can't believe how much more I'm sleeping. I'm spending more time working out, traveling more. And then it's usually like six months to a year after that that you get the call like, have you ever thought about hiring somebody part-time for some role in your company? Because I don't want to be back feeling like I have to be all in. I'd just like to do a little bit of something to kind of stay in the game, give me something to do. And I'm always like, you know, it's not that kind of job. You can't do it that way. I always say it's an on-off switch, not a dimmer switch. You're either in or you're out.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to get letters from shareholders who've been invested with us for 20 or 30 years saying our performance help them help aging parents in their final years, help send kids to school, allowed a family to take a nicer vacation than they otherwise would have. To me, that really brings home the real social value of the job. And to me, it's so rewarding that if I can do this somewhat effectively, I can't imagine spending the day at a country club instead of doing that. It's just something that I want to do. But time is one of the big sacrifices. You can't say I'm going to do this 40 hours a week. I've had friends who”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a big part of it is free time. I don't think you can do this job successfully as an eight to five job. When there's an opportunity that you think is out there, it's all consuming. And then you get back a little of the free time after that, but it's never as much as the amount of time that you invested in it. I think the challenge of doing something that academics say you aren't supposed to be able to do, the scoreboard nature of the business, of how is your fund performed relative to other people that are trying to do the same thing, there are parts of it that are like playing a game that I find very enjoyable. There's also the part where our decisions have a very real impact on the financial lives of our shareholders.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But notice Under Armor was the only store that still had most of the merchandise left in the store. All the windows were broken, but the merchandise was there. I think that said something about the strength of the brand at that point in time. So everything you do from stories your kids tell you to grocery shopping to reading the newspaper, you're always thinking about is there an investment angle for something that I'm learning about today?”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compelled to do it, you probably shouldn't because it is an all-consuming job. It will completely erase the lines between private and personal time and work time. And if you don't truly love this business, I think you're destined to fail because you either won't be willing to put in the hours that you need to succeed or you won't be loving the time that you do spend on it. So I think if you love this work, then kind of everything you do in your life becomes part of the game of beating the market. You go out shopping and you see which clothes are on the sales rack or overstocked rack after the riots here in Chicago five years ago. I was walking down Michigan Avenue and couldn't help.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are getting that downtime in the times where you don't have an opportunity to be unusually productive. I think part of it is also hiring people that love this business. I wouldn't last at a job if doing landscaping for 10 hours a day or something like that. But I truly love this and am very happy to listen to podcasts or books or whatever while I'm taking a walk, riding a bicycle on vacation, walking on the beach, listening to investment podcasts or books. To me that is relaxing. And I get emails lots of times from people saying, you know, they're considering whether or not they want to have an investment career. Maybe it's a career change. And I always discourage them from doing it. It's like, if you don't feel...”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there are a few things there. One is there are lots of times, like the past six weeks where this is an all-consuming job and we're trying to accomplish the amount of work that might normally take six months in six weeks of time. And we do ask a lot of everybody on the team during those time periods where we think the opportunity set is unusually large. In normal markets that are functioning well that aren't as volatile, if somebody wants to take an extra day or two off and take a long weekend, we encourage that. We don't aggressively track vacation hours or days on nice days. If the markets are quiet, I might take people out to the Cubs game or something like that. So you try to make sure that you...”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During these difficult times, you can't do that if you're worried if the business is going to exist. Do I have a job? And those of us who have been through it multiple times before have the challenge of helping the younger people get through that, just like I was on the other side of that 40 years ago.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sent out an email to not just the investment team, but all the employees saying, like, this is our time to shine. These are the periods we tend to add value in. And that's on the investment side. That's on client contact, proactively reaching out to tell the clients this isn't a time to panic. Here's what we're doing. If clients get comfortable that we're not asleep at the wheel and that we're trying to proactively take advantage of the chaos, they sleep a lot better at night. And I think those of us who've been here a long time, it's our job as culture warriors to instill that confidence in the younger analysts. And not just the analysts. We don't want the operations people worried that they're going to lose their jobs or we want everybody performing at the peak of their ability.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And them saying, you know, don't worry about this. We've been through this before. This, in fact, is a time where we usually add value. That was really important to me. And one of my roles as the longest tenured employee here is to instill that confidence in our younger analysts. It's something like 20% of our team only was here at the dot-com bubble. Maybe another 15 or 20 for the great financial crisis. Half the employees weren't here when COVID hit in 2020. So I can't just say to them, well, you remember when the GFC hit and how dark it looked for a few months and what a great opportunity that created for us to restructure portfolios. So the day, a couple days after liberation day, I had”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's no way to deal with stress. I think a big part of it is our belief that eventually stock prices and business values have to come together and that we are invested with management teams that will be proactive about making that happen. So if we're right on our forecast, if we're right in our belief of what a business is worth and what it's going to be worth at some point in time, the swings up and down in the interim, if anything, or an opportunity for the management maybe to repurchase shares more cheaply, maybe to make acquisitions at prices they couldn't otherwise have thought about making them. I think it was helpful to me when I joined Harris to have older partners who had been through cycles many times.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, one of my favorite hobbies is wine. So that's one way. That's a joke. I do enjoy studying wine, collecting wine, also drinking wine.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here should be able to help other people in a way that elevates the quality of everyone's work. So it's explicitly part of our compensation process how other analysts rank order the rest of the team in terms of how helpful they've been.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the end of the year, the people who are on our compensation committee will talk to all of the research partners about who's been most helpful to them over the course of the year. So it isn't just evaluating that this person recommended these five stocks and they either outperformed or underperformed how many dollars got put into client portfolios. Who do other people think their work is worth looking up to? Who helped them the most throughout the course of the year to develop the way they were thinking on the companies that they were following? And alarm bells go off to us if at the end of the year somebody's name doesn't come up in that process because we think the way the team has been constructed every”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collaborative process is one of the reasons we were one of the fastest groups back from COVID. The six or eight weeks that we spent out of the office was painful to us because we're so used to being able to walk to the next door office and have somebody who's willing to challenge you on an opinion, maybe has a contact that would be helpful. We just weren't making those check-ins with each other via Zoom. A lot of times it happens as a follow-up to a conversation that had nothing to do about a stock. You're talking about how great the Cubs game was last night. And then you say, oh, by the way, have you ever talked to this person at Netflix or Liberty Media or whatever? And, you know, the casual conversation turns into a business conversation and those weren't happening as frequently as we're used to when we were all trying to work.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We encourage analysts to challenge us on ideas. I mean, analysts learn very early on that My Door is open and I reward people for coming in and saying, I think you might be wrong on XYZ because of these reasons. It's very horizontal. We all challenge each other. And I think in some organizations analysts think they can't succeed unless another analyst fails. I think our concept of the team succeeds or the team fails is also very important to our long-term success. And that applies from the time an analyst is working on an idea. They don't have to be secretive about it. It's a collaborative process. The same is true in trying to identify mistakes. I think that.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Original forecast, and they aren't being as reactive to new information as a fresh set of eyes might be. But the second reason, and equally important, is that the first analyst has probably lost their voice. If somebody comes to you and the third time says, I know I've been wrong on this three times, but I still really want you to buy this, it's kind of like just noise in your ear where a fresh analyst who has no reason to come out on either side pro or con, a fresh analyst saying, you know what? I started with a clean sheet of paper here. I really like this and I want it purchased in accounts is much more likely to successfully get that name into client accounts than the original analyst would have been. So for us, it is an important process.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The typical process is to immediately require a devil's advocate review. An analyst will get assigned that if nobody volunteers. And we ask them to rush that presentation. And in the next one to two weeks present it to the group. If the stock stays on at that point in time, we will generally then go and kind of start at square one and meet with the management team again, preferably in their offices, and get us to recommit to a hypothesis that we think is strong enough that if we didn't own the stock, we'd be buying it. If there's a third shortfall, the typical process is to say, let's shift analyst coverage. And there are two reasons to do that. First being the initial analyst is probably too anchored on the”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the likelihood of an additional mistake is always higher after first mistakes. You find a lot of value investors who their knee-jerk reaction to a shortfall in company performance is to say, well, the stock's down 20%, but my value estimates only down 10. So it's actually a better buy today than it was yesterday. We've checked that on our own data and at least for us, that's rarely true. Usually that mistake is a signal that future mistakes are more likely. So after the analyst does this the first time, if anyone on the stock selection group wants to recommend the name get removed from the list, they can recommend that and there'll be a vote if one of the other two people on the committee agrees with them, the stock's off the list. If there's a follow-up mistake.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Error a lot of us make is we tend to think sometimes ignorance is a defense of the status quo. I don't really know enough to sell this stock. We would like to say if I don't know enough to buy it, then I don't know enough for it to stay in the portfolio. So if the first sign of a mistake and think of that as fundamentals deviating 10 to 15% from what the analyst had projected, we ask for an immediate review in front of the stock selection group to give us an understanding of what went wrong, why it doesn't violate our hypothesis, and why we shouldn't expect there to be a second error. And one of the reasons we do this, again, it said we're very data driven. We've looked at companies where we've made one mistake, two mistakes, three mistakes.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A mistake is when you don't get a forecast right, it's just as much a mistake if the company comes in way above your forecast as if it comes in way below. And we consider either a mistake and as worthy of extra attention when a mistake happens. The second thing is we define mistakes by in terms of company fundamentals, not stock price. So to us, a mistake is we didn't project company fundamentals correctly, either direction. And when that happens, regardless of if the stock has been a decent stock for us or not, we increase the attention. And the goal of this is we want the path of least resistance to be our mistakes exit the portfolio rather than mistakes linger.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The use of the term protocol was intentional to make it sound as important as it is to our process. We think rapid identification of mistakes and getting capital redeployed into something where we have a higher probability of success is one of the keys to our long-term success. So first thing is we think about mistakes as”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Small team approach. We don't even like the word group. Group makes it sound like it's too many people. But these three-person teams, we find a very manageable size and kind of keeps us in the middle of the problems at either extreme.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having goals that aren't in the client's long term interest. This isn't easy business to pursue a gambler's ruin kind of outcome where you make a bad decision on one company and you think you can kind of make up for it by double weighting the next decision. And you're taking your shareholders down a path that is not in their interest when you do that. That's a very hard place to get to. when you need to convince a group of people to do something. It's also tough. Like if I've got a buddy that says NVIDIA is a great stock, but I can't put it into a value framework, it's virtually impossible for me to get that into our portfolio here. So the risk of us doing something different than what we tell clients we're doing is also diminished by having this”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I challenge any decisions. It's not overwhelming to try to get one other person out of two people to agree with you. It's not like it's a group of a dozen decision makers and you need to get eight or nine to agree. Where I think there is a risk when you get that large that groupthink is a problem and kind of the best ideas sometimes aren't obvious to everyone and to convince the majority of a partnership group that it's a good idea, I think would keep you out of some of our more successful ideas. So I think we're small enough that anything that somebody has tremendous conviction on, they've usually got the ability to convince somebody else. But the other thing you don't want is somebody making decisions and maybe”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of like the question before where you said it looks like we kind of straddle between a traditional value camp and buy great business and don't ever sell them. I think we're kind of in between here as well where we think the group is small enough and we all have an ability to”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And being able to implement whatever decisions about the business they want to. And they maintain that total decision-making control right up to the day they walk out the door. And then it's kind of good luck, guys. And you turn it over to people that haven't been in a position of their opinion driving a decision making. And we've intentionally tried to avoid that by doing team-oriented decision making. We don't want the loss of any one person to ruin the ability to continue making decisions in the same manner. Harris has always made them.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stock gets added, and a two out of three vote in that group determines if it goes into the portfolio or not. So effectively my role as well as theirs is sort of a tiebreaker. If two people agree, it doesn't matter what the third person thinks. And if two people disagree, then the third person is the controlling decision maker. And we have been using that approach because we want to make sure that whenever personnel transitions occur, that we aren't throwing somebody who's brand new into decision making, into a role where they're a sole decision maker. I think that's one of the reasons we focus so much on process. And I think something a lot of investment firms struggle with, you have this leadership group that's used to getting their way.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Space by excessive valuations. And we don't want to be limited to the big businesses that are getting pushed out of the large cap universe. We don't want those to be off limits. So anyway, we've got about 100 names on the list. Mike Nicholas, Bobby Beerig, and I will sit down and talk about all the new ideas, as well as the existing portfolio. We probably average twice a month in times where the markets are hectic like they've been so far this quarter. We might be meeting every week. And at times when the market is more stable, it might be monthly. And we'll talk about, does this name add something to our portfolio? Is it cheaper? Is it a diversifier? Why somebody thinks that it should be added to the portfolio? And any of us can recommend that”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People sometimes assume that people like Clyde McGregor or myself, Tony Canaris, that have been long-term investors here, that we can just buy whatever we want in the portfolios we manage. That's not true. We're all constrained by this approved list of stocks. We can recommend a stock if we want to. We can ask an analyst to work on it if we want to, but it has to go through the process. be approved by the committee and then put on the list before we can consider adding it to a portfolio. Our list has about 100 names on it that would be eligible for the Oakmark Fund. That means a big business in the 250 largest sales net income or shareholders equity. We don't do large cap because we don't want to be exposed in times that smaller companies get pushed up into the large cap.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the meeting tomorrow, we'll spend half an hour to 45 minutes on each new idea. The analyst will give a couple minute summary. And then all the arrows come out. I mean, everyone at the meeting is trying to present an argument why the analyst might be wrong. And at the end of that discussion, three of our investment leaders who form our stock selection group will vote on whether or not that stock should be on the approved list and a majority vote controls whether or not”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Typical analyst hero maybe do four or five of those over the course of a year. They'll do a write-up that basically we've got a bunch of standardized statistical sheets, but the written part, we want the analysts to show why we believe the stock is cheap, why we're comfortable the value is going to grow, and why this is a management team we're comfortable investing with.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So this packet just came to me today, right before we started our call. In it is any new ideas that analysts are recommending, any devil's advocate reviews, reviews on all of our existing holdings where analysts are expected to review them at least annually, but to target those reviews toward points in time that are action-oriented. either like us to be adding or trimming or where there's been a significant change in our hypothesis. So we will all spend this afternoon and this evening reading through this, checking some of the things with cell side reports on these same companies. And then that forms the basis for our discussion tomorrow. So new ideas, we get probably about one a week on average.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT