Long thinking,
short positions list.
How we think about markets, valuation, and time. The premise behind everything that follows on this site, and behind every mandate we run.
Philosophy first, strategy second.
An investment philosophy is a coherent way of thinking about markets – how they work, where they fail, and the kinds of mistakes that consistently drive investor behaviour. It is the lens, not the action.
An investment strategy is much narrower. It is one way of putting a philosophy into practice. A firm can run several strategies, but they should all sit on the same philosophical ground.
Everything that follows – how we evaluate a business, how we read management, how we think about price – is downstream of that distinction.
Three lenses, applied in order.
We read the business first, then the people running it, then the price. A position has to pass all three lenses for us to own it.
A business worth owning.
We look for companies that are growing structurally, are simple to understand, and have a real and durable competitive advantage.
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Growth that compounds. The company grows faster than its industry; the industry grows faster than the market. Both have to be true.
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Structural, not cyclical. Long-term, sustainable demand – not a single product cycle or a one-off tailwind.
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Focused and understandable. If we can't explain how the business makes money in two sentences, we don't own it.
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A real moat. A sustainable competitive advantage from brand, cost, scale, technology or patents, distribution, or industry structure. Most companies don't have one.
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Change in the right direction. A positive shift in the sector – receding competitive intensity, regulatory tailwinds, or a structural rerating of the category.
People we'd trust with our capital.
A good business with poor management is, eventually, a poor business. We spend real time on the people, not just the numbers.
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Competency across cycles. Track record on the metrics that matter – sales trajectory, margin profile, capital allocation – through more than one market environment.
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Interests aligned with minority shareholders. The economics of the people running the business should sit on the same side of the table as ours.
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Governance we can verify. Transparent reporting, ethical conduct, a clear organisational structure, and a track record of treating every shareholder the same way.
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Accountability, on the record. Management that owns its mistakes in writing carries more weight than management that only ever celebrates wins.
Price is the last question, not the first.
We don't start with the price target. We start with the business and the people, and only then ask what it's worth and what we'd be willing to pay.
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Cash flow is central. A company's value is the present value of the cash it can generate over its lifetime. Everything else is a proxy.
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Multiple lenses, one judgment. Intrinsic value, discounted cash flow, dividend yield, operating cash yield. No single number is the answer; the convergence across methods is.
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Margin of safety scales with uncertainty. The narrower the moat, or the weaker the management, the greater the discount we need before we'd commit capital.
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Reward, relative to risk. A position only earns its place in the portfolio if the upside meaningfully outweighs the downside in a documented way.
Three lenses. One question repeated until the answer is honest: would we put our own money here?