Posts by Todd Wenning, CFA
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Why Regret and Good Investing Don’t Mix
2 March 2023Last year, during the Q&A portion of one of our quarterly investment webinars, we were asked if we regretted selling pet insurance […] READ ARTICLE
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Playing Long Games: Focus on Companies with Moats and Relevant Products
3 February 2023The longest nine-inning Major League Baseball game took four hours and forty-five minutes to complete; the shortest took just fifty-one […] READ ARTICLE
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3 Ways to Measure Management Integrity
5 January 2023“A man got to have a code.” – Omar Little, The Wire Many quality-focused investors say that integrity is a […] READ ARTICLE
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When the Moat is in Your Mind
7 November 2022 “How did Coca-Cola build their moat? They deepened the thought in people’s minds that Coca-Cola is where happiness is. […] READ ARTICLE
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Equity Duration & Inflation: Defining Equity Duration
30 August 2022 This is Part I of a three-part series. Read Part II here and Part III here. “Our willingness to […] READ ARTICLE
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Seeking Treasures from the Storm
21 July 2022My wife is an avid seashell hunter. Her family tells me this has been a lifelong obsession. She’s intent on […] READ ARTICLE
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Great Companies are Forged During Crisis
4 April 2022A few years ago, my wife and I visited the beautiful Muir Woods just outside of San Francisco. Walking into […] READ ARTICLE
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Pricing Power and Inflation
16 February 2022“The single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without […] READ ARTICLE
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Nintendo Comes to a Fork in the Road
9 December 2021“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra Despite the joy Nintendo the company […] READ ARTICLE
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15 of Our Favorite Investment Patterns
27 October 2021 “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” – […] READ ARTICLE
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There’s No Such Thing as Buy and Hold
16 August 2021 We recently repaired my grandmother’s mantle clock. It’s a nice piece and looks good in our living room, but […] READ ARTICLE
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When Quality Companies Face a Reckoning
27 July 2021Over a long enough timeline, every quality company faces a reckoning. According to Bloomberg data, only two of our current […] READ ARTICLE
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Companies Trying to Do Unsustainable Things Sustainably
25 June 2021In 2007, during the credit-fueled boom that swept across housing and financial markets, former Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince famously – […] READ ARTICLE
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Pay Attention to the Castles Behind the Moats
17 March 2021Since Warren Buffett first described the concept of an “economic moat” over 30 years ago, his students, including us, have […] READ ARTICLE
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The Quality Margin of Safety
13 January 2021We recently came across this fascinating chart by Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria, who formerly ran the Nomad Investment Partnership. […] READ ARTICLE
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Why We Want to Own Interesting Businesses
1 October 2020“Invest in a promising company you don’t care about, and you might enjoy it when everything’s going well. But when […] READ ARTICLE
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Nintendo: Capitalizing on Nostalgia
14 July 2020“Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” – Mad Men Nintendo kindles warm childhood memories of playing Super Mario Bros. and […] READ ARTICLE
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No Company is an Island
16 June 2020“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the […] READ ARTICLE
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Has the Game Changed?
16 March 2020Game’s the same, just got more fierce. – Slim Charles, The Wire In Sean’s recent posts, he discussed how we’re […] READ ARTICLE
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Relevance Versus Recognizability
21 February 2020Most of the products that were popular in your youth have faded into obscurity. But you still remember them. You […] READ ARTICLE
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Corporate Culture: No Predator Without Prey
9 January 2020One of our favorite investing scenarios is finding a company with a remarkable culture taking share from incumbents that […] READ ARTICLE
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The Heart of Value Investing
19 November 2019At the heart of value investing is buying an asset at a discount to its intrinsic value and – here’s […] READ ARTICLE
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Masimo: Doing Well by Doing Good
4 November 2019In January 2017, we wrote a post on the opportunities and threats of investing in healthcare stocks over the next […] READ ARTICLE
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Why Brand Stewardship Matters
16 October 2019Sometimes, I am even asked why I can feel so optimistic about our future. The answer is simple; We are […] READ ARTICLE
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Diagram of Ensemble’s Investment Philosophy
18 September 2019“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks […] READ ARTICLE
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Why We Sold This Controversial Stock
7 August 2019As discussed on our Fall 2018 conference call, we owned shares of pet insurance company Trupanion in our core equity […] READ ARTICLE
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Why Boring Stocks Are Beautiful (And May Be Risky Today)
22 July 2019Investors who’ve studied the works of Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch know that so-called “boring” stocks can present wonderful investment […] READ ARTICLE
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Moat Erosion Starts Behind the Castle Walls
17 June 2019A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. – Ariel Durant Traditional competitive […] READ ARTICLE
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Going From Rule Breaker to Rule Maker
12 June 2019The last scene of the 1967 movie The Graduate is one of the most iconic in film history. Benjamin, played […] READ ARTICLE
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Looking for the Next ROIC Machine
10 May 2019Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas What […] READ ARTICLE
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Additional Thoughts on Idiosyncratic Companies
8 May 2019In late April, I wrote another article for British investing publication, Investors Chronicle. This time around, I focused on what we […] READ ARTICLE
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The Motley Fool’s Second Interview with Sean Stannard-Stockton
29 April 2019Following up on a 2017 interview with Sean, The Motley Fool sat down for a second interview to get into […] READ ARTICLE
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How We Think About the Innovation Hype Cycle
2 April 2019Until the 19th century, humans got from Point A to Point B in limited ways. They could walk, ride a […] READ ARTICLE
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Delivering on What Customers Really Need
28 February 2019In a November podcast interview with Tim Ferriss, marketing guru Seth Godin expanded on one of the most famous marketing […] READ ARTICLE
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The Many Ways to Mortgage a Moat
11 February 2019When investors worry about a company’s eroding moat, they’re usually focused on external threats. A new competitor with a revolutionary […] READ ARTICLE
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Making Sense of Understanding
24 January 2019For most of my driving years, I relied on repair shops to do all the work on my cars. It […] READ ARTICLE
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Taking Advantage of Hyperbolic Discounting
2 January 2019After reading psychologist Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Warren Buffett’s investing partner, Charlie Munger said that it, “filled in a lot […] READ ARTICLE
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Why Bother Forecasting Cash Flows?
26 November 2018I recently read a tweet from a European investor who shared the following quote from an unnamed CEO: “If we […] READ ARTICLE
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Stockopedia Interviews Ensemble Analyst Todd Wenning About Moats
16 November 2018Earlier this summer in New York City, I met up with Ben Hobson from Stockopedia, a U.K.-based stock market data […] READ ARTICLE
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Ensemble Capital Hosts Teenage Investor and Author Maya Peterson
14 November 2018Last weekend, Ensemble Capital hosted two educational events in the Bay Area with Maya Peterson, a 16-year-old investor and author […] READ ARTICLE
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The Coming Storm for Consumer Staples Dividends
31 October 2018Consumer staples companies with high dividend payout ratios may have found a solution for their dividend problems. Last week, AB […] READ ARTICLE
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How We Think About Digital Moat Sources and Threats
19 October 2018A few weeks ago, I wrote a feature article for Investors Chronicle, one of the UK’s largest investing publications. The […] READ ARTICLE
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Finding the Right Mix of Visionaries and Optimizers
4 October 2018In the classic Nintendo game, Ice Hockey, you pick a team of four players with one of three body “types.” […] READ ARTICLE
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Seeking Unpredictable Value Creation
18 September 2018Reading old articles about Amazon’s 1997 IPO is predictably amusing. The most common critique of the time was that Amazon’s […] READ ARTICLE
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Investing in an Age of Disruption
8 August 2018At a recent conference, Jorge Paulo Lemann, co-founder of Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital, told the audience that he’s “a […] READ ARTICLE
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Two Shortcomings of Quality Screens
16 July 2018Michael Lewis’s classic book, Moneyball, describes how the Oakland Athletics baseball team used quantitative analysis in the early 2000s to […] READ ARTICLE
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Defining Visionary and Optimizer CEOs
27 June 2018At the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger lamented not investing in Amazon, Google, and Wal-Mart […] READ ARTICLE
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Putting Winners and Losers Into Perspective
31 May 2018A few weeks ago, I met up with some friends in Central Pennsylvania for a weekend of fly fishing. I’d […] READ ARTICLE
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The Great Moat Debate of 2018
21 May 2018In recent months, there’s been heightened debate over the term “economic moat.” The peak came during the first week in […] READ ARTICLE
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How Corporate Culture Can be a Moat
4 May 2018The phrase “corporate culture” can be eye-roll inducing. It sounds like something right out of an M.B.A. textbook or the […] READ ARTICLE
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When Dividends are a Problem
26 April 2018Before joining Ensemble, I wrote a book called Keeping Your Dividend Edge, which discussed ways investors can identify promising dividend-paying […] READ ARTICLE
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The Evolution of Moat Analysis
11 April 2018In his memoir, Shoe Dog, Nike founder Phil Knight described how difficult it was to raise capital in the 1960s. […] READ ARTICLE
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The Two Things We Look for in a Management Team
22 March 2018Imagine you went back to 2007 and told investors that within the next ten years, General Electric would cut its […] READ ARTICLE
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3 Ways for Companies to Improve Guidance
12 March 2018Over the last few decades, there’s been much debate about what makes for useful management guidance on conference calls and investor presentations. Here’s Warren Buffett, for example, in his 2000 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, providing some reasons why guidance is dangerous: READ ARTICLE
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Why We Like Idiosyncratic Companies
16 February 2018One of the best things about raising kids is watching them learn. Our three-year-old, for instance, recently entered the “Why?” […] READ ARTICLE
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Why We Didn’t Invest in This Good Business
5 February 2018In investing, knowing what you don’t want to own is just as important as knowing what you do want to […] READ ARTICLE
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How to Guard Against Moat Erosion
18 January 2018“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” – Intel co-founder, Andy Grove There’s a lot to like […] READ ARTICLE
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How I Learned About Moats and Joined Ensemble Capital
3 January 2018It’s a pleasure to join Ensemble Capital. I couldn’t have asked for a more welcoming and supportive group of colleagues. […] READ ARTICLE
