Exclusive Interview with Jake Rosser by The Manual Of Ideas
H/T ValueConference
We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jake Rosser, managing partner of Coho Capital Management. Jake founded Coho in 2007 after working in equity research positions at the value-oriented Auxier Focus Fund and sell-side firm Pacific Crest Securities. He was also a strategy consultant at Alliance Consulting Group. He holds an MBA from Tuck and lives in Portland, Oregon.
The Manual of Ideas: Please tell us about your background and the genesis of your firm. What motivated you to set up your own firm, and how do you envision Coho Capital evolving over time?
Jake Rosser: Curiously enough, I did not discover value investing until after business school. At the time, I was working in strategy consulting and happened to come across The Essays of Warren Buffett. In consulting you spend a lot of time trying to fix broken business models and learn much about what kinds of operating decisions can imperil a company. Buffett’s common-sense approach to assessing the value of a business as well as the simplicity with which he ran the companies within Berkshire Hathaway struck a chord with me. It represented the antithesis to the way most companies conducted themselves. From there, I read the Intelligent Investor and at that point I was hooked.
My route into investment management started with a stint at a boutique investment bank focused on technology, called Pacific Crest Securities, where I was part of the semiconductor research team. While many investors are quick to denigrate the caliber of sell-side research, I found my experience on the sell side invaluable. It gave me a solid foundation for deconstructing company financials and conducting scuttlebutt research. Most importantly, because there is a voluminous amount of writing involved in publishing research it forces one to focus on the fulcrum points of a company’s business model and its investment merits. And surprisingly, given the herd behavior on Wall Street that the sell side helps foster, it helped bring a clarity of focus to my research efforts. This was due to the fact that to be a good analyst on the sell side, one had to truly become an expert in their field of coverage. While now a generalist, that kind of singularity of purpose has served me well in fleshing out the knowledge base for the companies in my portfolio.
After Pacific Crest, I had the good fortune of working for someone whom I consider to be one of the best investors in the world, Jeff Auxier, with the five-star rated Auxier Focus Fund. As the Focus Fund’s only analyst I had the opportunity to examine hundreds of investment opportunities across dozens of industries. Jeff has a profound respect for what risks lie beyond the financials, and he taught me to be a business analyst before a stock analyst. My tenure at Auxier also helped me learn the intense discipline and patience required to wait for the fat pitch to come your way. In the Internet age, one is barraged with so much information, that one’s focus can be obscured. It takes discipline not to get sucked into the chatter. Working with Jeff helped me develop a feel for the extraordinary alignment of events required to create an attractive investment opportunity. They are by nature, rare, so developing a feel for what creates an extraordinary opportunity and enough skepticism to watch hundreds of pitches whiz by the plate is a learned art.
After three years at Auxier, I thought the timing was right to hang my own shingle. The inspiration behind Coho Capital was Mohnish Pabrai. There may have been another investor who brought Warren Buffett’s partnership model into the modern age but I am not aware of one. Unlike the vast majority of investment vehicles, it was clear that Pabrai’s vehicle was designed to make money with his investors rather than off his investors. The ethics of that equation had an instinctive appeal for me.
Like Buffett’s original partnership, Coho Capital is an all-cap fund unconstrained by style boxes and is agnostic with respect to geography. The number and quality of fish one catches is determined by how well stocked their fishing pond is. Our all-cap mandate and lack of geographic confinement allow us to fish from a well stocked pond.
In terms of the evolution of Coho Capital, I hope to expand my partners’ retirement options. If I can deliver on that goal, everything else will take care of itself.
The Manual of Ideas: When it comes to stock selection, what are the key criteria you look for in potential investments?
Jake Rosser: Successful investment outcomes derive from buying the right business at the right price. We have found that more often than not, buying the right business has a much larger outcome on investment returns than buying at an absolute bargain basement price.
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