Dorsey Asset Management

Pat Dorsey

Pat Dorsey runs Dorsey Asset Management, a concentrated long-only equity firm he founded in Chicago in 2013. Before that he spent more than a decade inside Morningstar, joining as a young analyst and rising to Director of Equity Research, where he built the research team from about twenty analysts to nearly a hundred and created the firm's "economic moat" ratings — the framework for judging which companies enjoy durable competitive advantages. He wrote the methodology down in two investing books, "The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing" and "The Little Book That Builds Wealth," before that job he was Director of Research for Sanibel Captiva Trust, an independent trust company serving wealthy clients. At Dorsey Asset Management he runs a small, concentrated book of roughly ten to fifteen names, betting on businesses with moats — strong brands, patents, network effects, or high switching costs — that let them keep earning above-average returns for a long time. His approach is long-term and hands-off by design: he looks for companies that can compound on their own, holds them for years, and does not push management to change course. His own background is academic rather than financial; he studied government at Wesleyan and earned a master's in political science from Northwestern before finding his way into research. The idea that gave him his reputation was born at Morningstar: rather than label a stock "buy" or "sell," he asked whether a company could defend its profits against competitors over decades. That framework, refined and popularized in his books, is what he brings to every holding at Dorsey Asset Management.