I owned RWGFX in my Roth IRA. Switched the entire position last year to River Park Large Growth (RPXFX), managed by Mitch Rubin. I prefer a fund with a small asset base (58 mil), especially given the sudden in-flows into RWGFX. RWGFX is very concentrated.

Thanks Charles and David for your comments. I have owned several individual holdings of RWGFX for many years and very happy with it. Recently trying to shift more investment allocation to mutual fund or separate account to reduce the stress and time required for monitoring individual stocks. RWGFX seems a good choice.

Looks like it is still doing pretty well:
RiverPark/Wedgewood
Here's link to David's profile:
RiverPark/Wedgewood (RWGFX) – September 2011

I revisited the conference call and looked through it's holdings; I found a lot to like. The assets increased dramatically since the call David moderated. Anyone still own it? and your thoughts are appreciated. Thanks.
David

Our profile, for what interest it holds.
David

Just doing some early morning checking on my funds and noticed that the ER for RWGFX at Schwab is 1.05, down from 1.14 I think earlier. RWGFX just got better.

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111903601104579445234136525634.html#text.print
M* Snapshot Of RWGFX: http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/f?t=RWGFX&region=usa&culture=en-US

It looks like the expense ratio will drop by the end of the year for RWGFX. Looking at the RiverPark semiannual report, it looks like the fund charged $178K for advisor waiver recapture over the last 6 months and there is another $37K left it can claim over the next 2 years (this is on a fee base of. My read is that fee should level off at around 1.15% in a year or so, and there isn't room for it to go much lower than that.
Also, it looks like RPHYX will burn through the its advisor waiver recapture by 2016, at which point the expense ratio will drop (but not by a lot).

Reply to @Old_Joe: Different fund. All explicitly stated expense ratios in the Opening Post is for RWGFX and that is a retail class fund. Ted must be commenting on RWGFX because ER for RPHYX is not stated at all.

Reply to @Ted: Expanse ratio of RWGFX which is a "Retail" class fund, is 1.25%. not Institutional class. Institutional class ER is 1.00% according to M*

It seems like the funds in the RiverPark family all have an expense ratio of at least 1.25% (for the retail class). RiverPark Short Term High Yield RPHYX has over $800 million in assets. I recall it was unlikely to lower its expense ratio because of the amount of work involved with its strategy, plus the inherent limit on its manageable assets.
However, RiverPark/Wedgewood RWGFX now has $1.1 billion in assets and doesn't seem like a particularly costly strategy, but it's expense ratio has been 1.25% since day one. 1.25% is not outrageous, but there are quite a few decent large cap offerings with lower expense ratios.
I would have thought RWGFX might have lowered its expenses over time, but given that the 1.25% seems to be the lower bound for all the RiverPark funds, perhaps they have no plans to reduce expenses for any of their funds, regardless of size?

At a penny each, here is my two cents: (pigeonholed in a M* box of course)
LG: SEQUX, RWGFX
LB: YACKX, FMIHX
LV: GOODX, FAIRX
MG: POAGX, AKREX
MB: CHTTX, WEHIX
MV: ARTQX, FAAFX
SG: BCSIX, AUMIX
SB: FSCRX, HSCSX
SV: FCPVX, WSCVX
International: ARTKX, OAKIX
Emerging Markets: ODMAX, WAEMX
L/S: MFLDX, BPLEX
*Subject to Change Hourly

ARTKX and RWGFX both up today. RWGFX is presumably due to Apple (which has been a drag on it all year); not sure about ARTKX but Europe generally had a good day.
On the flipside, ARIVX was down almost as much as the Russell 2000 index (despite being 60% in cash), and PAUIX is also continuing its dismal 2013 performance.

Reply to @David_Snowball: My issue certainly is not with Mr. Sherman, but RiverPark. Based on their high ER practice with RPHYX and RWGFX. Their ultra high minimums for institutional shares. Concerned that at the end of the day, RiverPark is more of an asset gatherer than a shareholder friendly shop. Exploiting talent more than partnering with it. Do you think Mr. Sherman is receiving the preponderance of the $9M in fees his good strategy will now generate?

Reply to @NickF: Hi, Nick!
The "Featured Fund" tab will lead you to a special page for every fund on which we've hosted a conference call. Those pages include an mp3 version of the conference call, an audio-profile (also mp3) of the fund, an updated full profile, highlights of the call and links to fund information.
We'll post the RWGFX page on May 1. For now, Chorus Call is hosting the (downloadable) mp3 of the conference call: http://78449.choruscall.com/dataconf/productusers/mfo/media/mfo130417.mp3
Hope that helps,
David

Thanks for the update. I have invested in this fund for a short while but I was having too many funds in my portfolio and after some thinking I have concentrated my pure large cap equity exposure to mostly to YAFFX and AKREX for now. But RWGFX is still in my radar.
I agree with the manager on APPL. Even without jobs the company is generating a lot of free cash flow. $400 price is actually very good.

Dear friends,
I had a chance to speak with David Rolfe of Wedgewood Partners and Morty Schaja, president of RiverPark Funds, tonight. A couple dozen listeners joined us, though most remained shy and quiet. Morty opened the call by noting the distinctiveness of RWGFX's performance profile: even given a couple quarters of low relative returns, it substantially leads its peers since inception. Most folks would expect a very concentrated fund to lead in up markets. It does, beating peers by about 10%. Few would expect it to lead in down markets, but it does: it's about 15% better in down markets than are its peers. Mr. Schaja is invested in the fund and plans on adding to his holdings in the week ahead.
Rolfe invests in 20 or so high-quality, high-growth firms. He has another 15-20 on his watchlist, a combination of great mid-caps that are a bit too small to invest in and great large caps a bit too pricey to invest in. It's a fairly low turnover strategy and his predilection is to let his winners run. He's deeply skeptical of the condition of the market as a whole - he sees badly stretched valuations and a sort of mania for high-dividend stocks - but he neither invests in the market as a whole nor are his investment decisions driven by the state of the market. He's sensitive to the state of individual stocks in the portfolio; he's sold down four or five holdings in the last several months nut has only added four or five in the past two years. Rather than putting the proceeds of the sales into cash, he's sort of rebalancing the portfolio by adding to the best-valued stocks he already owns.
For what interest it holds, that's Apple. He argues that analysts are assigning irrationally low values to Apple, somewhere between those appropriate to a firm that will never see real topline growth again and one that which see a permanent decline in its sales. He argues that Apple has been able to construct a customer ecosystem that makes it likely that the purchase of one iProduct to lead to the purchase of others. Once you've got an iPod, you get an iTunes account and an iTunes library which makes it unlikely that you'll switch to another brand of mp3 player and which increases the chance that you'll pick up an iPhone or iPad which seamlessly integrates the experiences you've already built up. As of the call, Apple was selling at $400. Their sum-of-the-parts valuation is somewhere in the $600-650 range.

Morningstar this evening is reporting a price per share of $4908 for Apple. If any of you own shares, I'd consider selling them at that price to Mr. Mansueto, Morningstar's founder. Heck, he's worth $1.6 billion - he can afford it.

In general, the companies in the fund's portfolio have been growing earnings noticeably more quickly than their share prices have risen, so the portfolio's P/E is actually dropping. He contrasted that to the high-dividend consumer products companies whose share price "has been one fire" while their earnings lag.
Finally, the strategy capacity is north of $10 billion and he's currently managing about $4 billion in this strategy (between the fund and private accounts). With a 20 stock portfolio, that implies a $500 million in each stock when he's at full capacity. The expense ratio is 1.25% and is not likely to decrease much, according to Mr. Schaja. He says that the fund's operations were subsidized until about six months ago and are just in the black now. He suggested that there might be 20 or so basis points of flexible room in the expenses. I'm not sure where to come down on the expense issue. No other managed, concentrated retail fund is substantially cheaper - Baron Partners and Edgewood Growth are 15-20 basis points more, Oakmark Select and CGM Focus are 15-20 basis points less while a bunch of BlackRock funds charge almost the same.
On whole, it strikes me as a remarkable strategy: simple, high return, low excitement, repeatable. I'm curious, as ever, about what reactions other folks had.
For what it's worth,
David

Looks like Mr. Rolfe et al have actually done well since inception in Oct 2010 with RWGIX & RWGFX, despite only modest YTD performance. Here are the lifetime numbers and comparison over same period with growth ETFs from Vanguard VUG and IShares IVW:

And attendant M* performance plot through April 10, 2013:

I generally like their quarterly commentaries, straight forward and comprehensive, although I thought their most recent letter (1st Q '13) was a bit defensive. The letter acknowledges missed upside right upfront, but then points to all the usual culprits on why the current escalation is unwarranted (insert Mr. Bernanke’s experiment, Professor Shiller's inflated P/Es, unsustainable corporate profits, and expanded margin buys).
Interesting that Berkshire Hathaway BRK is seen as a growth stock. I would like to understand why they think so, as it usually seems more of a defensive holding.
I also like their sensitivity to protecting downside. They appear to be capturing virtually all of the large growth index performance longer term but with less volatility. I would be interested in better understanding what implicit philosophy, allocations or techniques (eg., thresholds, triggers) they employ, if any. Perhaps they could answer in the context of Apple AAPL, one of their highest conviction holdings and an underpinning of the fund's performance. I understand they first bought in 2008 (presumably for private accounts) and I see they added last quarter. Here is AAPL's rise and fall:

I like that they run a concentrated portfolio of "best ideas," some of which are described in this example:

Utilizing the Morningstar stock screener, we screened 1,515 domestic companies with a market cap of greater than $5 billion that also generated a return on assets of at least 20% and found only 19 companies. We own six of these beauties - Apple, Coach, Monster Beverage, Priceline.com and Verisk Analytics.

I think I understand their "business owner" approach, as championed by Warren Buffett. More than say looking for deeply discounted companies, they pursue instead "uniquely profitable, financially stable growth businesses that are trading at requisite attractive prices.”
I do not like their ER of 1.25, especially given AUM of $725M, in what appears to be an otherwise shareholder friendly shop. That ER translates to $7-8M a year. It's well over the median of 0.98. Institutional shares require minimum of $1M, even at Schwab, which is out of reach for most investors. So, I guess I'd like to understand why they believe their high ER is justified given the other quality, lower-cost offerings available. With the many pluses this fund has going for it, I suspect AUM growth in response to lower ER would more than make-up for any temporary short-term or perceived long-term shortfall in revenue to RiverPark Advisors and Wedgewood Partners. Lower ER would help turn their current bronze status to gold.
In any case, looking forward to the conference call as always.
Thanks David.

The Observer is pleased to invite you to join a conversation with David Rolfe of Wedgewood Partners and manager of RiverPark/Wedgewood Fund (RWGFX and RWGIX). This is the second of three calls with managers who have strong convictions and actually implement them. Those skeptical of funds with high cash stakes might appreciate the fact that David remains fully invested despite a wariness about a stretched market.
We will be joined by RiverPark’s president and co-founder, Morty Schaja. David runs a high conviction growth portfolio: about 20 names and an average holding period of four years. There are 750 “actively managed” U.S. equity funds which, today, own over 100 stocks. Mr. Rolfe’s estimate is that he’s owned barely 100 over the past quarter century.
For a guy whose portfolio trails 97% of its peers so far in 2013, David seems unruffled. Why might that be the case? Two factors stand out:

Wedgewood has crushed the competition over the past quarter century. And, frankly, over most periods since then. By way of example, David’s strategy returned 9.1% annually over past 15 years (through 3/31/13) against the S&P500’s 4.3%. Over the past five years he’s beaten the S&P by a margin of 12.6% to 5.8%. The margin of victory for the seven-, ten-, and twenty-year periods are comparable. David has been managing the portfolio throughout.
The marketers have no say over how things will run. As many larger fund firms because hostage to the need to gather assets, more managers know that they need to manage for mediocrity. That is, a single bad quarter or lagging year will cause their marketers to howl. David notes that such pressure is alien to Wedgewood’s long-term, performance-driven culture.

Our conference call with David will be Wednesday, April 17, from 7:00 - 8:00 EDT. Just click REGISTER and you'll take been to the Chorus Call website where you'll register and receive a toll-free number and a PIN. As before, we'll try to divide the call in thirds: in the first third, they’ll talk us through the fund's genesis, universe and strategy. In the middle third, I'll ask a handful of questions - some suggested by folks on the Observer's discussion board. For the final third, we'll open the lines to your questions.
David engaged one of the Vanguard folks in the latest round of the “active/passive” debate at a recent conference. The issues in that debate suggested a couple topics that he’d like to address in his opening 20 minutes about what “active” managers can learn from the success of “passive” approaches. He believes that “active management” is sometimes miscast as “portfolio churning,” an approach he rejects. But he also thinks that most active portfolios are structurally flawed and that meddling by the marketers distorts the manager’s decisions.
As always, I'm looking for questions to raise with Mr. Rolfe. Folks looking to learn more might check our profile of RiverPark/Wedgewood or Wedgewood's just-released first quarter 2013 shareholder letter.
So it's Wednesday, April 17, from 7:00 - 8:00 EDT. Just click REGISTER. I'm really looking forward to the conversation and hope that you'll join us.
As ever,
David

Eliminated 2 funds (RWGFX, JATTX), sold down ARIVX down to token. With the funds raised, I have increased allocation to my existing funds GLRBX, YAFFX, AKREX, ARTKX, ARTHX, FMIJX, GPGOX, GPIOX. and finally added SFGIX.
SFGIX now looks more reasonable after expense ratio reduction and the past time established that portfolio manager Andrew Foster can operate well solo without the Matthews Research team.
Right now, I'm about 68% Equity. Despite all that I've done above, it did not change my overall equity allocation (may be plus/minus 1-2%) but slightly increased allocation to my top 4 and international funds I hold.
My top 4 funds remain:
GLRBX 9.52%
YAFFX 8.91%
PONDX 8.72%
AKREX 8.67%
35.82% of the portfolio.