AI Shortens The Moat with Todd Wenning, President and CIO of KNA Capital Management

Robert Kraft (0:00)

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In this episode of the Planet MicroCap Podcast, I spoke with Todd Wenning, president and CIO of KNA Capital Management, publisher of Flyover Stocks and director of the Hanley Center for ESG Investing at the University of Dayton for a wide-ranging conversation on motes, AI rates, and what endures through periods of rapid change.

We break down how AI is shortening the time a moat buys a company, why agentic commerce tools like Meta's Muse threaten businesses that rely on consumer inertia and obfuscation, and how rising real yields are quietly reshaping where capital flows.

We also get into what teaching corporate finance to college students has revealed about first principles investing, why the UK market is presenting some of the most compelling valuations he's seen in years, and what history's revolutions tell us about where AI is headed. We mentioned a number of companies in our conversation here today, and I'm not a shareholder in any of them. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Todd Wenning. Todd, thank you for joining me today. How are you doing, dude?

Todd Wenning (2:18)

It's great. Great to be back, Bobby. Thanks for having me.

Robert Kraft (2:21)

Absolutely. It's great. It's been a few years, and in the way things work now, three years is like 10 Just like saying the 60 is the new 30

In our world now, that's a long time. Honestly, since then, I mean, geez, Louis, you're taking on a few new titles. This is the last time we chatted between KNA, the launch, your teaching director of the Hanley Center at the ESG for ESG Investing at the University of Dayton. Catch us up, man. I mean, since the last time we chatted, I think I put that out at some point in 2023 So what's been the latest? What's going on?

Todd Wenning (2:57)

Yeah, no, it's been a while. It's been great, great. Past couple of years, really, the opportunity to teach at University of Dayton kind of came out of nowhere and really was a great opportunity for me to really test my interest in teaching. I'd already done that once. I taught an adjunct course at Xavier University to the MBA students introduction to corporate finance. But this was more of a regular teaching job where I'm teaching a couple of classes a semester and I get a chance to work with the students on one of the investment funds, which as you mentioned is ESG investing related, which by the way, I really didn't have much of a background in ESG. I was mostly, if anything, governance coming from Morningstar where I was the head of equity stewardship methodology, but not a lot in ENS and maybe we can touch on that a little bit later.

But it's been great. Going back to teaching, back in 2017 when I started at Xavier, I really wanted to see what it was all about. All of the people that we love as investors, Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, Joel Greenblatt, Michael Mobeson, they're all teachers. They all teach and so I wanted to figure out what that was all about. What draws these great investors who were very busy thinking about big concepts and little concepts and all sorts of things in between, what gets them interested in teaching? It became very apparent to me very quickly that there's a good reason for this.