We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Chris Hohn, founder and portfolio manager of TCI Fund Management, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, researched by the MOI Global team from the investor’s own letters, talks and interviews. 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:
Chris Hohn studied accounting and business economics as an undergraduate in the United Kingdom, where a visiting professor from Harvard Business School pointed him toward that school. He spent a brief period at Apax, in private equity, then seven years at Perry Capital, which sent him to London to build its European investing. He has said he was born into a poor family and always wanted his capital back. TCI Fund Management was established in June 2003. In 2008 CSX shareholders elected four of the five board candidates put forward by TCI and 3G Capital, Hohn among them.
He argues that risk comes before return, and that risk, in the definition he takes from Warren Buffett, is not knowing what you are doing. TCI spends nearly all its time on two questions: what protects a business, and what could disrupt it. The protection he wanted first was physical: toll roads, airports, transmission lines and cell towers. The test of a moat is pricing above inflation: 1 percent above inflation on a 20 percent margin, and profits grow 5 percent faster than revenue. In a 2025 podcast interview he singled out one lesson from his whole career: “investors underestimate the forces of competition and disruption. Because they just look today.”
Long holding periods: on a panel in Oslo in April 2025, he put the average life of a TCI holding at eight years, against less than a year for the average American stock. Concentrated quality: ten or fifteen stocks, each selling something essential; he counts perhaps 200 companies as high quality and investable. His example in 2025 was the rating agencies: an issuer can put off a bond deal for a year, but the debt comes due and new debt needs a rating. The shareholder’s voice: on February 20, 2023, he wrote to the chief executive and board of Airbus, urging them to end talks on a 29.9 percent stake in Evidian. On March 29, 2023, Airbus announced that it would no longer pursue those discussions.
The program opens with the letter TCI sent to the board of CSX on October 16, 2007. It goes back to Harvard, Apax and Perry Capital, and to an Italian telephone directory business where he learned that you can be wrong. It has Deutsche Börse and the Eurex bond future. It follows Microsoft’s Teams against Zoom and the Moody’s trade he tells against himself. It takes up the letters to Airbus, Altaba and Alphabet, and the seventeen emissions letters of November 30, 2019. It visits an investment team of seven or eight people that takes nothing at face value. It ends with the closing paragraphs of the same CSX letter.
The program quotes him from TCI’s letters and from his own talks and interviews. The letters run from CSX in October 2007 to Airbus in February 2023, Altaba, Aena, Union Pacific and Alphabet among them. The spoken record begins with his evidence to a parliamentary committee in London in January 2009 and a conference interview in 2013, and continues with a podcast and a climate-finance keynote in 2021. In 2025 it has a podcast interview with Norges Bank Investment Management, a panel and a session of his own at an investor conference in Oslo, and an allocators’ summit.
The complete program runs sixty-two minutes.
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Transcript
The transcript is available for download to members only.
