Forging long-term value-added partnerships with great investors
Partners Capital seeks to be more than just a passive investor to funds. We aim to have a meaningful and influential relationship with asset managers by adding value to their investment and business models where we can. Our value add to individual asset managers is only possible based on our experience in their asset class. Our dedicated asset class teams interact with over 1000 asset managers a year in the process of undergoing deep fundamental quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our approach is to be completely transparent with these managers about what we see as their strengths and weaknesses, starting in the initial due diligence process and continuing throughout our longer-term working partnership with them. We have helped new and established investment firms to consider investment and business model improvements in support of long-term outperformance based on our experience observing other managers in action. In many cases we co-invest with reduced fee arrangements and create proprietary vehicles with managers to better align our goals with investment strategies we believe will be most successful. In addition, we have helped to identify and seed new investment strategies, both with emerging and long-established managers.
What are we looking for?
We start with the empirically derived premise that the vast majority of active investment managers fail to generate outperformance that would justify their fees. The rare exceptions have developed a sustainable competitive advantage in an attractive and clearly defined subset of the investment universe. They are usually entrepreneurial, owner-operated investment businesses with their incentives aligned with those of their investors. They tend to display variable perceptions on markets and investment theses, to be capable of exploiting more complex and less competed investment opportunities, offer more robust analytical and risk-mitigating skills and are less likely to follow the herd into crowded trades. They are highly principled and ethical investors who manifest the highest standards of integrity in everything they do. They will be transparent with their investment partners and open to constant learning and adaptation to a changing world.