At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Thomas Russo of Semper Vic Partners opened with a line he first heard from Warren Buffett in a Stanford classroom in 1983: “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.” Forty years later, that sentence still runs underneath every position he owns. His talk, “Capacity to Suffer, Global Value Investing,” was really about one thing. He owns a tiny number of globally consumed consumer franchises for decades at a time, and he’s willing to sit through the quarterly earnings damage that shows up when management are investing for the next twenty years instead of the next earnings call.
Russo traced the whole approach back to that Stanford afternoon with Buffett, which his professor Jack McDonald had arranged. Two ideas from that session did most of the work in the forty years that followed. The first was tax deferral, which Buffett called the only real gift the government hands investors. Take it seriously and you let the company compound capital inside itself, pre-tax. The second was agency costs, which is a polite way of saying that managers drift toward looking after themselves rather than the people whose money they’re spending. Almost every filter Russo uses on a new name=points back to one of those two ideas.
The industries he actually hunts in
Russo’s universe is narrower than people assume. He buys global consumer brands, and not much else. The product has to be something consumers treat as non-negotiable. The brand has to carry enough pricing power to stay ahead of inflation. And the growth story usually has to live outside the United States, because roughly 96% of the world’s population does. The demographic backdrop he keeps coming back to is the billion-plus people in emerging markets reaching legal drinking age, middle-class levels, and aspirational consumption over the next two decades.
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