These are Wedgewood Fund's own holdings, not the firm's. Percentages are of the stock positions in its latest filing — the fund's cash and bonds are not included. A concentrated bet on roughly eighteen to twenty-two large American businesses, the Wedgewood Fund looks for market leaders with durable competitive advantages — companies whose moats its manager expects to hold up for years — and buys them only when they have hit temporary trouble at a price he finds reasonable. That makes it a growth fund with a value investor's discipline: it is explicitly contrarian, shunning momentum in favor of businesses it wants to own as an owner rather than trade. With a very small number of holdings and very low turnover, the portfolio reflects a conviction that the best returns come from staying put in quality names for the long haul. The fund is the mutual-fund expression of a strategy David Rolfe had been running for nearly two decades. Wedgewood Partners, the St. Louis firm that manages it, was founded in 1988 by banker Tony Guerrerio, and Rolfe joined in 1992, taking over portfolio management the same year the founding manager retired. The fund itself launched on September 30, 2010, offered through RiverPark Funds, with Rolfe as its portfolio manager from day one. A finance graduate of the University of Missouri, Rolfe started on the sell side at PaineWebber in the mid-1980s, then moved to the buy side after the 1987 crash, working at Centerre Trust and then Boatmen's Trust before arriving at Wedgewood. He credits following Warren Buffett since his college years — and the "seeds" of Buffett and Benjamin Graham — as the foundation of his thinking, describing his work as "investing as business owners."
$20.79M