Jean-Marie Eveillard: The Art of Global Value Investing

We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Mohnish Pabrai, managing partner of Pabrai Investment Funds and chairman and chief executive officer of Dhandho Holdings, 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: Mohnish Pabrai grew up in a suburb of Mumbai. His father started, grew, sold or shut down well over twenty ventures in forty-two years. He came to the United States around 1983 and took a degree in computer engineering. In 1990 he started TransTech, an information technology services firm, with his retirement savings and credit cards. On July 1, 1999, he started Pabrai Funds with eight friends as its first partners, on a legal structure copied from one book chapter about the Buffett Partnership. Dakshana, the foundation he co-founded in 2005, coaches its scholars for the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Technology. He calls himself a shameless cloner. He watches what Buffett, David Einhorn and Ted Weschler do and tries to reverse-engineer what they saw. He noticed that Berkshire Hathaway owned General Motors and forgot it in about five seconds, because he hated the auto business. Then, flipping through The Manual of Ideas, he saw that Einhorn owned it too, drilled into the company to learn why, and bought GM and then Fiat. At his April 2026 annual meeting a partner said he looked more like a trailblazer. “If you go through my portfolio, it is a trailblazing portfolio, but I am sorry to disappoint you, it is all a cloned portfolio.” Dhandho, as he applies it to investing, starts with downside protection. He credits the phrase heads I win, tails I don’t lose much to his friend Amar Bhidé. His case is Ipsco, a steel tubing maker whose cash and two years of promised cash flow came to nearly the whole share price. The checklist dates from the fourth quarter of 2008, built the way aviation studies crashes, from other investors’ mistakes and his own. By January 2014 it had about 97 questions, and its first section, on leverage, held the most failures. The big bets are few because the anomalies are few; that January he said it was approaching nineteen months since his last new idea. The program opens at the Best Ideas conference in January 2014, with his checklist and the three red flags it raises on carmakers. It goes back to his father, who paid an astrologer for a bright picture of the future. It has the silver bubble of about 1980 that paid for his American education. It covers the June 2008 lunch with Warren Buffett, won at auction to say thank you, with Guy Spier at the table. It tells how Dakshana copied Anand Kumar’s Super 30. It ends with the 2020 turn toward compounders, the coal thesis, and the partner who asked whether the cloner label still fit. Pabrai has spoken at MOI Global’s Best Ideas conference in 2014, 2021, 2023 and 2025, and 2018. MOI Global, which also hosts the Latticework summit, turned its Meet the Author Forum to The Dhandho Investor in 2019. At Best Ideas 2014 he opened with aviation and its checklists. In 2021 he said he was looking for compounding machines. In January 2025 his Best Ideas keynote made the coal case through CONSOL Energy. For more, see Mohnish Pabrai on His Coal Thesis and the Mental Model Behind It, which carries that keynote for Latticework members. The complete program runs sixty-two minutes. Get the next program the day it comes out. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app). The transcript is available for download to members only. Narrated by an AI

We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and chairman of Wesco Financial and the Daily Journal Corporation, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from the investor’s own letters, talks and meetings. 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: Charles Thomas Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 1, 1924, the son of a lawyer. His first job was at Buffett & Son, an Omaha grocery store where Warren Buffett would later work. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1948 and moved to Southern California. In 1962 he helped found the firm that became Munger, Tolles & Olson, and by 1965 he had left the law. He was vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway from 1978, chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation from 1977 to 2022, and chairman of Wesco Financial from 1984. He died on November 28, 2023, at 99. He argues that stock picking is a branch of worldly wisdom, and that worldly wisdom needs models from many disciplines. With only one or two models, he told students at the University of Southern California in April 1994, a person tortures reality until it fits them. The same lecture explained how he and Buffett moved past Benjamin Graham’s bargains: over decades, a stock can hardly earn much more than the business underneath it. In his Wesco letter for 1989 he wrote: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” The mental model he built the stock market on is the racetrack, where everybody bets and the odds move with the betting. The track takes 17 percent off the top, the market much less, so the wise bet heavily on the rare mispriced bet and the rest of the time do not. Misjudgment is his catalog of twenty-five tendencies, incentives first: FedEx got its night shift to load the planes fast enough only when it paid by the shift and let them go home once the planes were loaded. The wonderful business is See’s Candies, bought in 1972 for $25 million, about three times its net tangible assets; he and Buffett then raised its prices a little faster than others might have. The program opens at the Daily Journal annual meeting in Los Angeles in March 2015, where close to two hours went to questions. It goes back to Omaha and the two clients of his father’s practice, Grant McFayden and Mr. X. It has the 1986 commencement address at the Harvard School, a speech on how to guarantee misery, built backward. It works through the 1994 lecture on worldly wisdom, the misjudgment talk, the Wesco letters and his 2014 account of the Berkshire system. It closes with what he told the law graduates of 2007: that, like Epictetus, he had had a favored life. Beginning in 2018, members of MOI Global, the community behind the Best Ideas conference and the Latticework summit, gathered in Omaha on the Berkshire weekend for Best Ideas Omaha. In 2017 Phil Ordway updated the misjudgment talk with newer cases, which MOI Global published as Human Misjudgment Revisited. At Latticework 2025 in New York, Tom Russo of Gardner Russo & Quinn recalled meeting Munger at Stanford Law School. For more, see Remembering Charlie Munger: Life and Legacy, the This Week in Intelligent Investing episode MOI Global recorded two days after the news and released on December 2, 2023. The complete program runs sixty-seven minutes. Get the next program the day it comes out. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app). The transcript is available for download to members only.

We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Arnold Van Den Berg, founder and chief executive officer of Century Management, 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: Arnold Van Den Berg was born in Amsterdam, to parents who had fled the Nazis to Holland. His parents went into hiding, and a young woman from the Dutch underground carried him through the German lines to an orphanage. They were caught, taken to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz, and both survived. The family came to the United States in 1949. He sold insurance, then got his mutual fund license six months before the market peaked. In 1974, about three months before the market reached its bottom, he opened his firm in Century City, which gave it its name. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Century Management, in Austin, Texas. He built his method out of a shoebox. Whenever he read about an acquisition, he cut out the article, and on the weekend he ran every ratio. The file showed him what a sophisticated buyer would pay, and about 80 percent of that became his sell point. He gave MOI Global the rule in Omaha in May 2014. “I had the private market value, I have my worst case, and then I buy it no more than 20% above the worst case, and that gives me my five to one.” He says none of it needs more than fourth grade math. He learned visualization on a rope, by accident. He watched the city champion from Venice High School shoot up the rope, replayed it in his mind, and practiced the move in front of the mirror every night. He once wrote his wife, Eileen, a check for $250,000, when he was $20,000 in debt and grossing $8,000 a year. He says he has a hundred rules of thumb, and that his favorite milestone is an industry eight years into a bear market. The patience is in oil: in June 2021 he said the firm had bought early, been wrong for two or three years, and lost clients before the price went from $15 to $60. The program opens in 1987, with 50 percent of the portfolio in cash, clients leaving, and, by his account, the crash two weeks later. It follows his mother’s two kinds of people, and the market she made in garlic in Auschwitz. It covers the slide from 1969 to 1974 and the funds that did well, all run by people who believed in Benjamin Graham. It has his father’s death march and the one thought he kept on it, to move that leg. It has the prospect who counted four stocks where he had claimed three, and closed the account on the third call. It ends with the seismologist’s map, the move to Austin, and the wall of photographs. Arnold spoke at MOI Global’s Latticework summit in New York in 2019. He said that investment counselors are wrong a lot of the time. MOI Global, the community behind the Best Ideas conference and the Latticework summit, sat down with him in Omaha in May 2014. On November 18, 2014, at the offices of Century Management in Austin, the whole conversation went to using the subconscious mind in business. For more, see Arnold Van Den Berg: Five Decades of Investing and Life Lessons, which replays a segment of the 2019 Latticework session. The complete program runs fifty-three minutes. Get the next program the day it comes out. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app). The transcript is available for download to members only.

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. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app). The transcript is available for download to members only.

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. Great Investors is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube (or add the podcast feed to any app). The transcript is available for download to members only.