The Greatest Investors: Ralph Wanger

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Investment Style

Wanger's investing style at Acorn was simple: be a long-term holder of smaller companies with financial strength, entrepreneurial managers and understandable businesses that will benefit from a macroeconomic trend. He's quoted as saying, "If you're looking for a home run [Wanger preferred these to singles] – a great investment for five years or ten years or more – then the only way to beat this enormous fog that covers the future is to identify a long-term trend that will give a particular business some sort of edge."

Wanger employed the idea of investing according to "themes." For example, if he had been around during the California gold rush, he would not have been investing in gold claims, but he would have loved the businesses that sold miners their picks and shovels. The mines played out in a matter of months, but gold diggers kept at it for several years.

It is reported that Wanger was a voracious consumer of investment information. In valuing a company to invest in he looked for the following parameters:

• A growing market for the company's product or service
• Evidence of a company's dominant market share
• Outstanding management
• An understandable business
• Evidence of a company's marketing skills
• A high level of customer service
• Opportunity for a large stake in the company
• A strong balance sheet
• The price must be attractive
Lastly, Wanger said he constantly had to remind himself that you can have a good company but a bad stock


Quotes

"An attractive investment area must have favorable characteristics that should last five years or longer."

"Chances are, things have changed enough so that whatever made you a success thirty years ago doesn't work anymore. I think that by concentrating on smaller companies, you improve your chances of catching the next wave."

"If you believe you or anyone else has a system that can predict the future of the stock market, the joke is on you."

"Since the Industrial Revolution began, going downstream – investing in businesses that will benefit from new technology rather than investing in the technology companies themselves – has often been the smarter strategy."