Value Spain 2023

Andrew Brenton is the CEO and a co-founder of Turtle Creek. Previously, Mr. Brenton founded and was the CEO of the private equity subsidiary of The Bank of Nova Scotia where he invested $300 million in control positions of a dozen Canadian private companies. Mr. Brenton was head of the high technology investment banking practice of Scotia Capital in the early 1990’s and prior to that, he was a founding member and Managing Director in the firm’s mergers and acquisitions practice. Mr. Brenton joined McLeod Young Weir (the predecessor to Scotia Capital) in 1984.

Mr. Brenton received his MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario) in 1984 and his B.Sc. from Mount Allison University in 1980.

Xavier Brun joined Trea Asset Management in 2019 as a head of european equities and as a portfolio manager. He has more than twenty years of experience in asset management companies in roles as a Head of Middle Office at Gesiuris, SGIIC (5 years), Senior Equity Analyst at SIA Funds (4 years) and Head of Investments and Portfolio Manager at Solventis, SGIIC (8 years). He has been recognized as a best portfolio manager 2022 by RankiaPro and he got the Morningstar prize as best European Equity Pension Fund for 2018.

He holds a PhD cumlaude in Economics. He is a member of the faculty and director of the master’s degree in Financial and Banking at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Kamil is the Co-Manager and Partner at North of South Capital LLP. He is responsible for stock selection, top-down allocation, portfolio construction, quantitative analysis and conducts the company research, risk analysis and portfolio attribution. Previously having worked as an Equity/Derivative Portfolio Manager at Dresdner Kleinwort. He has over 15 years’ experience in equity and derivative trading.

Massimo is the founder, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Bayes Investments. He started his investment management career in 1988 at JP Morgan Investment Management in London, where he rose to become Head of the Global Balanced Group, with responsibility for international balanced portfolios. In 1999 he left JPMIM to become Chief Investment Officer, Director General and then CEO at Sanpaolo IMI Asset Management in Milan. He left the company in 2001 to start Horatius, an investment advisory company incorporated in 2004, which in 2007 became an asset management company. He left Horatius in 2012 to go back to London, where in 2014 he founded Bayes Investments.

Massimo holds a Doctorate (DPhil, 1991) and Master’s Degree (MPhil, 1987) in Economics from the University of Oxford (Trinity College). He graduated in Economics at LUISS, Rome in 1984. 

In addition to being Head of Research at Firebird Management, Steve Gorelik is the Lead Fund Manager of Firebird U.S. Value Fund as well as portfolio manager of Firebird’s Eastern Europe and Russia Funds. He joined Firebird in 2005 from Columbia University Graduate School of Business while completing education from a highly selective Value Investing Program. Prior to business school, Steve was an operational strategy consultant at Deloitte working with companies in various industries including banking, healthcare, and retail. He holds a BS degree from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a CFA (chartered financial analyst) charter and a membership in Beta Gamma Sigma honor society.

Steve serves on the number of supervisory boards of listed and private companies in the Baltics. He speaks Russian, English and his native Belarussian.

The Indépendance AM fund was created in 1990 and William Higgons became its manager in 1992. “Without theory, man is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.” William Higgons took this quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and decided to apply a clear and reproducible investment methodology.
Observing the decisions of other fund managers around him, he discovered that most were stock-pickers who followed their intuition without a clear strategy. A connoisseur of the US academic literature, he then devoted himself to studies on the outperformance of small listed companies over a long period. He therefore decided to reposition the fund towards listed SMEs, using the “Quality Value” strategy. This strategy proved particularly successful: the historic “Indépendance France Small” fund became one of the best performing 30-year funds in Europe.

Between 2001 and 2006, William Higgons took control of the entire Indépendance AM business, which became independent. The team was expanded with the gradual recruitment of experts. The Europe fund was created in 2018 and the closed-end Family Value I fund in 2021.

After 7 years of long term investing at insurer Santalucia and SantaluciaAM, Beltrán Palazuelo launched DLTV Europe on March 16, 2022 with Dux Investors (Deep Long-Term View). DLTV Europe focuses on identifying, accompanying and providing long-term capital to the best European companies and/or management teams in their long-term business plans.

Beltrán Palazuelo graduated in Finance from Northeastern University in Boston, USA in 2014.

Diogo Pimentel, CFA is an investment analyst at Magallanes Value Investors. Follower of the Value Investing philosophy, before joining Magallanes he held manager and analyst positions at BPI AM and Santander AM, where he worked closely alongside Iván Martín.

Diogo is an electrical and computer engineer from the Superior Technical Institute at the University of Lisbon. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Certification. and was awarded Best Manager and Analyst in 2013 and 2014 (Deloitte IRG awards).

Cole Smead, CFA is Chief Executive Officer and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management where he oversees all activities of the firm. He is the final decision maker for all investment decisions in the firm’s international equity portfolios. Cole has been with the firm since its founding in 2007. Prior to joining Smead Capital Management, he was a Financial Advisor with Wachovia Securities in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is a member of the CFA Institute.

Peter Smith, CFA is the founder and managing partner of Palm Harbour Capital LLP, a London based boutique investment firm that manages the Cobas Lux SICAV Palm Harbour Global Value Fund. Prior to founding Palm Harbour Capital, he worked alongside renowned Spanish investor Francisco García Paramés as a senior analyst at Cobas Asset Management. The Palm Harbour Global Value Fund invests primarily in global small and mid-cap equities with an emphasis on Europe. The team follows a value philosophy which focuses on investing in competitively advantaged companies when they trade at a significant discount to their estimate of long-term intrinsic value. They think like business owners, focus on cash flows and do their own deep primary research.  They take advantage of the short-termism of the market by investing in companies which are usually going through some sort of short-term issue, and take a mid-to-long-term view. They avoid speculative and overhyped market darlings.

Peter holds a BBA in International Business (Finance/German) from Texas Tech University, has a Masters in Finance with a concentration in Investment Management from the London Business School and is a CFA Charterholder.

Jonathan Y. Tanne CFA CA founded Tangible Investment Management in 2012 originally managing a long only listed equity portfolio for a family office. Tangible’s investment strategy is a long-term approach with an emphasis on compounding and capital preservation. It is a highly differentiated global concentrated portfolio of under-valued and under-researched businesses at different stages of their life cycles. Each business is identified by a bottom-up stock selection process and is subjected to a comprehensive 70-point research checklist. The portfolio is benchmark, sector, style, industry & market-cap agnostic. The portfolio has outperformed the MSCI ACWI IMI by about 400bps annualised since inception over the past decade.

Chris is an Assistant Portfolio Manager and Analyst for Coeli Global, a 1bn EUR Global Asset Manager based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Chris has extensive Smaller Company Experience, having worked at Munich based Gallo Fonds European Smaller Companies and Pie Funds, a New Zealand based Boutique Global Small Cap manager.