YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Trigg

lines on the record: 79
first: 2025-10-27
most recent: 2025-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We've doubled down on the rigor around our forecasts and our modeling. If you think about the names that we've been involved with in a big way the last three or four years, these are companies that are going to look dramatically better in the future, in some cases going from loss-making companies to making significant margins and being some of the most profitable companies in their sectors, you have to really be able to tell that Mo trajectory story through numbers and through a model we've established a lot more rigor on that front too.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was happening is collaboration with tipping into coordination. It started to feel bureaucratic. This was a very low lift way of making light touch collaboration, which is important without meeting creep.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were doing lots of regular one on one check ins throughout the week. Yan Lao spent a couple days in our office around that period of time and made this incredible recommendation around this document that we now fill out every Friday at noon that talks about what you did last week, what you're doing this week, interesting things you encounter throughout the week that you want to share with the team, things you need back from people. So we instituted that and that lifted an incredible management burden off of us. A lot of really what we're trying to do is just make sure people are focused on the right things any given week. And then you want clarity and communication. You want to know what everyone's working on.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One was the portfolio construction tool, as Mike mentioned, so prioritization, categorization. From a team dynamics standpoint, we really reduced meeting sizes to get the people with the strongest views and most relevant views in the room and trying to keep it to five or six people. That was a tricky one because we had to exclude people that could have gone a different direction where there was a lot of angst and pushback on it, but we're pretty transparent as far as here's why we're doing it. Here are some of the things we're seeing that were not diminished clarity of thoughts, lower speed of decision making. Most people got it pretty quick. Others had questions, but then it was building the performance back and people seeing the evidence of that helped us get through that.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you don't know you're right in the moment. This firm is so close and so tight knit it come off of an unprecedented streak of success and growth. People don't want to see that come to an end by any means. And that is part of what makes this place what it is. There's no complacency. There's an incredible desire to win at all times. I don't think there was one horrific story where we totally hit rock bottom or anything like that. It was a lot of self-doubt at times. There's been times over the years where we've stayed up very late at night together and question, are we doing the right thing? There was a moment years ago when we were trying to go all in on this concept of mojectory 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, I don't really buy the concept of pattern recognition and everything.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During those months that what we had sold was snapping back, you'd get email chat or internally, you do client calls and be like, are you sure you guys made the right moves here? These software stocks, for instance, are up 40% in the last month. You just sold them. That's not easy. You're getting called out and the performance isn't there. So I think those moments, there were several of those where Mike and I would stay late and commiserate over this. The asset we had, Ted, and continue to have is Mike and I were on the same page. We've been 20 years at this trying to build this journey of how do you build an investment manager that stands a test of time without succumbing to preservation mindset, having that hardwired into how we view the world was huge because there'd be days I'd be okay and he'd be down. There'd be days he was okay and I was super down. We know each other well enough to be counter emotional during those points. So I think that helped June of 23 was a moment where there was email.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so difficult as an asset manager. I've had this great success, you have this hiccup, you're refreshing the portfolio, you're in 2023, and it's not working. In retrospect, you can look back and say, well, we were right, it worked. There must have been conversations at that point in time where there's a little bit of WTF going on here. What were those more challenging moments like in terms of?”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimism and the foundation of trust among the team was we've been through cycles before. It's not like we're a message manager that was born in 2017 wrote a good wave and then 2022 hit. We've been through cycles or market leadership change and having that compass around mode trajectory and culture where it's proven in the past to work gave us that internal and external goodwill to get through that period.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loneliness part. And fortunately, the end of 23 was a very different story, and 24 and 25 has been as well. And now if you look at those same frozen portfolios, there's a piece that we published on our website, which talks about this period of time. And you can see, have we done nothing and continue to run the old portfolios, what the performance would be versus what the current portfolio is. And the performance improvement is not just good. It's drastic. Fortunately, those decisions were rewarded soon enough to where it became really, really hard. That was probably the hardest part.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Following year, you're making these changes. Turnover's up. You're really trying to explain to people the process improvements that we've put in place. And then also just being incredibly transparent about the ideas themselves, re-educating people on truly what Mo trajectory is. It's about identifying high quality in the future before the market does, not about what the company's necessarily done in the past. There's a loneliness when you're going through that. And you hear the chatter, these guys better be right. You start to get into a period in 2023 where you had a little bit of a snapback. We're taking the portfolio then further away from then what's snapping back. And we do these frozen portfolios where we look at prior vintages of the old portfolios versus the current portfolio. What you want to see is that the turnover that you're engaged in is a actually leading to a portfolio that's performing better, not worse. In that first part of 2023, the results were not there to justify the changes that we were making. And that was the lowest.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A celebrated turnover. I mean, you're selling names like Louis Buitton and Costco and buying names like Rolls-Royce and Siemens Energy. Drift, quality bias. What are you guys doing? Both externally and internally. Thankfully, we've built a research culture here that insulates the team from a lot of that noise and built a phenomenal marketing and sales force as well could be connoted as Drift or be evaluated as Drift. In reality, what it was is getting back to Moe trajectory and culture because we had lost that a little bit during that period that helped us from a communication standpoint. The other point is the feedback isn't immediately good from a performance standpoint. You're making these changes. It's not the next month. You're paid off. Oftentimes you're a little bit late, a little bit early. That compounds the questions you get.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the hardest part clients were incredibly supportive, and you say everything's fine. This is part of running portfolios. We've been here before. And then you start to see elevated turnover. You're going to get questions about that.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it came to looking at the portfolio, a lot of times you have this drawdown and the names you own, you won't hold because you do want to be long term. And what you're talking about is refreshing a portfolio that's down. What were those conversations like?”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned, but what it also ended up being was this incredible tool to improve the idea generation and the focusless breadth because you could very clearly see what we're in, what the other names are that are similar to that, what we're not in, use that as a filter marshal the team's resources around different ideas”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other tool that enabled that effective prioritization was creating this thing called categorization, which for years we have been frustrated with the traditional GICS classifications around sectors and industries. And we thought wouldn't be cool to have our own custom version of that. And coming out of that period, we basically created 100 different categories across about 700 companies. And that allowed you to go a layer deeper than even our bucket taxonomy that we used to think about construction between defensive, secular, and cyclical growth. We rely on that quite a bit to think about the construction of the portfolio at any given time. This actually went a layer deeper because that broke down because of some of these correlations that Sanjay was mentioning. So now you can actually see at the category level what the bets are in the portfolio. You have a better sense of what you own and also what you don't own. That was initially designed to fix this correlation problem that we”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very easy to chase the next data center themed stock. But now I think we have guardrails and tools such that if we see three analysts trying to bring up another data center theme stock to own, we'll pull up our construction and say we own enough of this unless you're really convinced it's better than an existing idea we own in that category. We're going to redirect efforts elsewhere. So I think having those guardrails as a forcing function to making sure you have that breadth up idea generation is something we've hard coded.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a couple of key tools we developed. The one was pulling the thread on what was the core issue on portfolio construction, a moat trajectory and culture of the pillars we talk most often about, but portfolio construction has been a key driver to the consistency of WSAM's performance over a long period of time, not just finding the best ideas, making sure they fit together. One of the conclusions was the portfolio was too correlated, but the root causes of that was the research pipeline had become too correlated. We developed tools and a common language over prioritization as a lean team. How do you prioritize which idea to work on next? I think if you just let your team tend to be a decentralized organization, they'll naturally chase what's working. In 2020, it's let's look at another software as a service stock. And there was endless IPOs. It was very easy to run into that problem. And flash forward to today.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only other thing I would add is that when you go through a lawnball market like you did up to 2022, 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 it doesn't have quite the breadth that it should. Coming into that year, we did a lot of things knowing that the portfolio felt expensive and thought we were taking the proper action to sell certain positions. The whole focus list felt expensive. So it didn't feel like there was great places to go. We had sold a lot of our biggest winners that had been the growthiest COVID beneficiaries, but it still wasn't enough reinstituting this focus on making sure we got a really wide breadth of different ideas. That's been a really important thing that's helped us.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That rallying cry sparked a reevaluation of the portfolio. And then when you zoomed out from there, you realized there was just a lot of change at play. 2022 was a dislocation in that correlation between backward and forward-looking quality growth. You had some of the interest rate and inflation dynamics. You had the birth of new secular growth themes, ranging from artificial intelligence to obesity drugs. The biggest shock to the system was just these supply-demand cycles. COVID pulled forward demand for a lot of industries and then created a lot of sticky supply bottlenecks that were proven to be long-lived in nature. You add all that up and you throw on things like geopolitics more recently, you just recognize that we had to adapt, we had to change and forward-looking quality growth was going to be different than backward-looking quality growth and we couldn't just camp on what it worked.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a seminal meeting in November of 2022, and Mike crystallized the issue at play with really a rallying cry where he said, we need to put the trajectory back in mode trajectory. We'd been through this 10 plus year period heading into the COVID bull market where backward and forward-looking quality and growth were highly correlated. Effectively, you could just keep owning the same thing and do well names like Louis Buitton. They just rerated Costco year after year, 15 to 20 to 25 to 30, you started to condition your muscles in the wrong way, thinking that that was always going to be the case. We camped out in these so-called compounders a bit too long. And when we zoomed out, asked the question, hey, it's the moat trajectory of these companies positive or these companies actually getting better, you put that under the microscope, you start to raise questions.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaking to some of the things we wanted to do differently, or some of the things that we wanted to use to evolve the investment process, they're like, oh, of course, even when things were going well, you guys were doing that. That led to a lot of good conversations with clients.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Core values or think different and get better. So by definition, we believe in this notion of the iteration of your investment process and constantly trying to evolve and get better. We've always told the story back to the days when we both worked at Morningstar. Morningstar had this thing called the Morningstar Investment Conference in the mutual fun world. The Berkshire Hathway Annual Meeting, we would go to that in our early 20s. It was a big opportunity to hear the preeminent mutual fund managers at the time speak. And one thing that we observed was one year there'd be the Morning Star manager of the year a rock star walk in with an entourage and people were running after the guy in the hallway of the place in Chicago that they had the event five years later person was nowhere to be seen. 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. That's how we're wired and we've always talked to clients about that even when we were”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It got kind of interesting when there's this tug of war between trying to stick to what's gotten you to where you are today versus trying to flex and adapt and evolve the investment process. That's where you need to be right if you're going to make some of those changes evolving and adapting what we do, creating different pieces of infrastructure to execute the process in a more robust way, enabled by some lessons that you learned and mistakes that you made. We're also fortunate to have these two pillars, our investment philosophy, motrajectory and culture, which are pretty flexible in terms of where they can be applied in the market. They kind of work almost in every sector as we started to come to the conclusion that what had been the winners over the prior 10 years may not be the place you want to be in the next 10. We weren't having to completely change what we do. We're just having to kind of apply it to a different part of the market or different companies. That message was well received.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were incredibly positive. We actually had net inflows on the institutional side through that period. Lot of the sustained performance in prior years had created a great foundation and a lot of goodwill. There weren't difficult conversations, many that I can think of during that period.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chopping wood, figuring out what to do because oftentimes playing the long game is the right strategy, the market's myopics, stick to your knitting. But there are occasions where long-termism is a lazy crutch. It was like epiphany moment, but as we put the pieces together, we realized this was one of those moments where there was so much change at play that we needed to sensibly adapt to what was going on.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very rich topic as far as how to invest in managers react to disappointing performance. I'll avoid the euphemism of volatility. Culturally, I think we were in a good spot because Mike and I have always led the research team in a pretty even heeled fashion. So in 2020, 2021, there was some high fives in the office. Main thing we would tamp things down and warn people that market moves in cycles were not this good. 2022, you have the currency really to like go to the team and act inspirationally. Having the team where we've hired several people in recent years, it's very important from a cultural standpoint. I set that tone and make sure we're in a position where people see that we're operating from business standpoint, from a position of strength. There's no reason we can't make the best judgments. A lot of the other business considerations a manager might have during a time like that we did not have.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equities. And we too, I think, had done better than our peers. So it's easy to say, hey, look, we've done pretty well. We've performed the way the clients want, but we took that opportunity, particularly beginning kind of in October, to look inward and identify two or three profound lessons that we've used to incrementally improve the investment process from here.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a certain type of investing that was working. We probably weren't having that much fun, even though we were doing great. I was really looking at 2022 as, wow, this is great. This is another opportunity for us to reassert how we're different in the market and separate ourselves again. Fast forward three or four months later, the different stages of grief. There's like these different stages of underperformance. Man, I just want to start winning again. There's a seminal meeting that took place within our team in October of 2022 after it was pretty clear that we were going to have a really bad year. All sat in a room for a day. And it was very easy at that period of time for a growth manager like us to point to all the external factors that had led to our underperformance, rising interest rates, rising inflation, high starting valuations. None of these things are good for forward returns of growth.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible trajectory over the last 15 years. You have this bump in the markets in your style of investing. That as a firm. 2022 was incredibly humbling in many ways. It was our most difficult year performance-wise, now with the benefit of three more years. You kind of look back on it and say, I'm so glad that happened to us because I know we've gotten so much better because of it. I think back to that period in May of 2022, we had had a dreadful January and February to start the year. muddled along for the next couple of months and we had a firm white offsite. And I got up in front of the entire company and I said, I am so excited about being here right now because Sanjay and I had both felt 20 and 21 while we had incredible, absolute, and relative returns. And that was a continuation of a very long period of both consistent and very durable outperformance. The market had become a little bit one-note.”
2025-10-27 · Capital Allocators · Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source