Triple Frond Partners

Triple Frond Partners

Triple Frond Partners is a Seattle- and San Francisco-based investment firm best known for running a strikingly small, patient portfolio. It was founded by Stuart McLaughlin, a longtime partner at the San Francisco value shop Sansome Partners, and today is managed by Charles F. Pollnow, who earned his MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1989. The firm has filed quarterly reports with the SEC since at least 2008, running a low-key operation that rarely makes headlines. The firm's approach is quiet and concentrated. It holds only a handful of large and mega-cap companies — often no more than ten to fourteen names — and it tends to keep them for years rather than trade around them. The focus falls on technology and growth businesses with durable moats: established firms with long track records of compounding. Pollnow and his colleagues describe themselves as looking for "quality compounders" and letting the businesses do the work, holding positions through thick and thin with very little turnover. They do not agitate for change at the companies they own; they simply buy what they consider to be excellent businesses and sit. What sets the firm apart is its unshakeable confidence in a very short list of names. Where many investment firms spread risk across dozens of holdings, Triple Frond is comfortable that nearly all of its money sits in its top positions, largely in companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta. It is the investing style of a firm that would rather be deeply right about a few companies than broadly right about many.

based on 29 of 50 closed positions