Our purpose is to maintain and grow the real value of endowments, while providing a stable stream of income, to help our investors achieve their long term aims.
Investing perpetuity capital allows us to be both opportunistic and patient, enabling us to see through short term volatile markets.
Our investment philosophy consists of four pillars that shape our decision making. It enables us to refine the investment universe and identify world class investment opportunities whilst maintaining capital in order to generate significant real returns.
A disciplined investment process is at the heart of our investment success; to develop a deep understanding of a manager’s process, strategy, people and incentives. Ongoing objective evaluation allows for timely decision making.
Exceptional investment talent drives investment returns. We look
to source partners whose interests and time horizon are aligned with our investors and who focus on absolute, not relative returns.
We invest globally across strategies with a range of short, medium, and long durations. The flexibility to invest in innovative ideas means we are not reliant on backward-looking models to shape our portfolio.
We manage risk holistically at the OEF level, with a focus on achieving the long term real return objective, while providing investors with a stable and growing annual distribution. We don’t manage to a benchmark or try to predict short term economic or political outcomes; our goal is to ensure the OEF has the resilience to navigate volatile and complex market environments.
Our team has the freedom to make investments today that may not come to fruition during their lifetime. We pursue long term themes across asset groups, where we believe tensions, changes or inefficiencies in economies and markets provide investment opportunities.
We build constructive relationships, partnering for the long term and across market cycles. The stability of the Fund’s long term capital helps us secure allocations in the most sought after investment groups.
On a day-to-day basis, portfolio & risk management is embedded in our investment process, with substantial monitoring of a variety of portfolio metrics and exposures, alongside more qualitative flows of information.
We are looking for long term partnerships with investment groups so, before any investment is made, we complete thorough quantitative and qualitative diligence: including: investment, operational, legal and ESG. Our detailed approach and decades of experience enable us to invest in emergent strategies and back first-time funds, where standard datasets are often unavailable.
For each individual investment we routinely evaluate progress against the original investment thesis as well as reviewing any changes to a manager’s team or business model. This ongoing evaluation enables us to make informed and timely decisions to ensure the optimal mix of strategies and managers for the Fund.
Wide ranging sourcing generates ideas from: current managers, peer organisations, former managers, intermediaries, conferences and desktop research. We often back new groups and spend time in the market to ensure a high quality flow of ideas. We view exceptional investment groups as those singularly focused on generating long term returns, a clear alignment of interests – financially and philosophically – and a collaborative and interactive relationship with OUem. Often these groups are capacity constrained and in the position to choose their investor base. Finding and accessing these managers requires the team to source globally and use networks and relationships they have built over many years.
