Mar Vista 13F (2026 Q1): A Wide-Moat Book Leaning Into AI

A wide-moat book that just dipped below a billion

Mar Vista Investment Partners runs a focused quality-growth strategy built around a simple filter: own businesses with durable competitive advantages and the free cash flow to compound shareholder value over time. Its 2026Q1 13F shows about $999.7 million across 35 positions, slipping just under the billion-dollar mark after a year of gradual asset erosion. The portfolio is a clean expression of the wide-moat school, the kind of book where you recognize almost every name and where the interest lies in the weighting and the marginal moves rather than in obscure picks.

The top of the book is a roster of franchise businesses: Apple (6.55%), Nvidia (6.28%), Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, TransDigm, Broadcom, Visa, Johnson & Johnson, and Moody's. No single position dominates; the largest is just 6.55% and the top ten cluster between roughly 4% and 6.5%, a moderately concentrated structure that spreads conviction across a slate of high-return compounders.

The book is balanced, but not static

What gives the filing its character is how flat the weighting is across the top names. This is not a manager making one giant bet; it is one assembling a balanced portfolio of businesses it considers structurally advantaged, then sizing them similarly. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, TransDigm, Visa, and Johnson & Johnson were all held essentially flat this quarter, the steady core of a low-turnover quality strategy.

Leaning into the AI hardware complex

Against that steady backdrop, the meaningful moves all point in one direction. Mar Vista added aggressively to Broadcom, lifting its share count by 68%, and increased Nvidia by 14%, with a smaller add to Moody's. In a portfolio where most positions did not budge, choosing to build Broadcom and Nvidia is a clear statement: the firm is leaning further into the semiconductor and AI-infrastructure complex while leaving its consumer-and-software core untouched. For a quality-growth manager, that tilt reflects a view that the wide-moat case for the dominant AI hardware suppliers, scale, switching costs, and pricing power, has strengthened enough to warrant a bigger weight.

The gradual decline in reported value, from roughly $1.22 billion a year ago to just under $1 billion now, looks like a mix of modest market movement and asset outflows rather than any wholesale repositioning, since the underlying book stayed remarkably stable apart from those targeted semiconductor adds.

How to read a balanced quality-growth filing

With a book this evenly weighted, the largest holding is not the headline; the marginal moves are. Mar Vista's flat core tells you what the firm wants to own for the long run, and the share-count changes tell you where its conviction is currently strengthening, this quarter, unambiguously toward AI hardware. That is the productive way to read a low-turnover quality manager: treat the steady positions as the long-term thesis and the additions as the live signal of where the team sees the moat widening.

You can review the full 35-position book, the quarter-over-quarter share changes, and the longer history on the Mar Vista filer page.