2 Stock Pitches by Wengang Ji (Trigram Partners)
Interview #131 - Discusses background, launching Trigam Partners, approach to investing, and shares two stock ideas.
For this edition we welcome Wengang Ji from Trigram Partners.
Wengang discusses his background, launching Trigam Partners, his approach to investing, and shares two stock ideas.
(Disclaimer: This interview is for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be seen as investment advice. Please do your own research before investing in any company mentioned).
Hi Wengang, thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
Hi Jon, I really appreciate the opportunity and am honored you asked me to be a part of this.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
I was born in China, grew up in Singapore, and moved to the United States in 2008. I bought my first stock in 2003 while I was a junior in college — roughly ten years later than Warren Buffett, which I suppose means I started with a permanent handicap on the compound-interest scoreboard.
Very early on, I knew investing was what I wanted to do. To me, investing always felt like a giant intellectual scavenger hunt: searching through fragments of information, connecting dots others overlook, and occasionally finding something hiding in plain sight.
What attracted me most was that the scorecard is ultimately objective. Markets may disagree with you for a while, but eventually results matter more than opinions, politics, or popularity.
I studied Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, which probably shaped how I think about the world. I have always been more comfortable being rational than fashionable, and more interested in being correct than being part of the majority.
That definitely did not make me the most popular person growing up, but in investing, being comfortable standing apart from the crowd is often an advantage rather than a liability.
Over time, I realized that many great investments come from places where consensus is either absent or emotionally uncomfortable. Temperament, more than IQ, is probably the rarest asset in markets.
Can you provide readers with a brief overview of Trigram Partners?
Trigram Partners was really born long before the paperwork existed. From around 2016, after years of wandering through different investment theories and market fashions, I finally arrived at the Graham-and-Buffett school of investing.
The more I studied markets, the more I realized that while investing can be intellectually complex, the underlying principles are surprisingly simple: buy understandable assets at sensible prices, insist on a margin of safety, and let compounding do the heavy lifting over time.
In 2017, I began managing money for friends and family under a structure that was intentionally aligned with investors: 0% management fee and 20% performance allocation above a 6% hurdle. I later formed a small LLC to manage those accounts, which eventually became the predecessor to Trigram Partners.
In 2023, I decided to formalize the structure and established Trigram Partners as the general partner to what would later become Trigram Fund LP. The fund itself was formally launched in 2025, although the initial capital largely came from separately managed accounts that had compounded together for years.
Structuring the launch as a contribution-in-kind of securities allowed long-time investors to defer capital gains taxes — a practical reminder that tax efficiency, like investing itself, benefits enormously from patience and long-term thinking.
Today, Trigram Fund LP remains my one and only investment partnership. We do not charge a management fee. Instead, we earn 25% of profits above a 6% absolute, annually compounded hurdle rate. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize that this arrangement bears more than a passing resemblance to the early Buffett Partnerships. That resemblance is intentional.
Our investment approach is also heavily influenced by Buffett Partnership-era thinking. Broadly speaking, we operate through two categories. The first is what Buffett once called “Generals” — undervalued securities where price and intrinsic value have diverged meaningfully.
The second is “Specials” — selective arbitrage and special-situation opportunities that occasionally arise when markets become temporarily inefficient.
Risk control is central to everything we do. Because essentially all of my after-tax liquid net worth sits alongside our partners inside Trigram Fund, I think about downside risk constantly.
We use no leverage at the fund level and avoid the kind of highly leveraged arbitrage strategies that have historically destroyed otherwise brilliant firms. Margin of safety is not a slogan for us; it is a survival requirement.
Ironically, despite following a fairly old-fashioned investment philosophy and largely avoiding areas where I cannot confidently predict long-term economics — particularly much of the technology and AI landscape — the fund’s performance from 2022 through the first quarter of 2026 has averaged slightly above 40% annually before incentive allocations. Fortunately, our partners do not seem to mind the absence of fashionable narratives.