We are delighted to share with you our audio program on Ed Wachenheim, chief executive and chairman of Greenhaven Associates, part of the Great Investors podcast by Latticework. Each program in the series is an hour-long narrated profile of one investor, drawn from MOI Global’s archive of interviews and conference sessions and from the investor’s published work. 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:
The introduction of Ed Wachenheim as a Latticework 2018 speaker took four lines. Williams College, then Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Three years at Goldman Sachs. Then Central National Corp, as an analyst and then as a portfolio manager. In 1987 he set up Greenhaven Associates on the family’s own money, and three years later took outside money, an amount he limited deliberately. The firm runs out of Purchase, New York, and has never published a letter. He is its chief executive and chairman, and he wrote Common Stocks and Common Sense. By April 2026 the firm had $12 billion under management.
He wants to double his money, and he wants a reason for it that Wall Street has not already priced. He has no opinion on the market. Balance sheets come first, under an office rule that a firm makes its money off the income statement and survives off the balance sheet. He gave Graham & Doddsville the method in April 2026 in one sentence. “We project earnings two or three years out, put a multiple on them (16x or 16.5x for an average company, maybe 19x for an above-average company), and that is what the business is worth to us.”
In the fall of 2025 he had thirty percent of the portfolio in homebuilders, and he told the room that thirty percent is the limit. General Motors, at ten percent, he calls a truck company. In 2011 he put a housing thesis into Home Depot, Lowe’s, Masco, Owens Corning, Lennox and Whirlpool, because the builders’ balance sheets were too weak to own. He bought Union Pacific late in 2003 and one airline, Southwest, which had as much cash as debt.
The program opens in October 2025 with 45 percent in cash, which he called historic, and a market at about 28 times earnings. It follows the friend he met off the train on October 19, 1987, who had sold that day. It covers the 2014 letter asking Whirlpool’s chairman not to buy Indesit, and the sale around the start of 2023 after an acquisition put too much debt on the balance sheet. It has AIG, which he called the worst investment of his life in July 2016. In March 2020 he said he felt like a sailor lost in a fog, and that the firm had been net sellers until the day before. It ends with the Lennar walk to $315 a share and the tennis coach who told him to buy a ticket.
He spoke at MOI’s Latticework summit in New York in the fall of 2018 and again in the fall of 2025. In 2018 he set out the hunter-gatherer thesis and worked Whirlpool to $300 a share. In 2025, asked whether a new technology justified a permanently higher multiple, he said he did not want to be the skunk at the picnic. MOI Global’s members also gather at the Best Ideas conference. John Mihaljevic, MOI Global’s chairman, opened a special online session on March 19, 2020. For more, see Ed Wachenheim: How a Contrarian Mindset Leads to Outperformance, which replays the 2018 conversation, and Latticework 2025: Ed Wachenheim on Homebuilders, which replays the 2025 session.
The complete program runs sixty-nine minutes.
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