Pacific Asset Management (“PAM”), the London-based asset manager, announces today that European equity investment specialists, Viewforth Investment Partners have joined the firm.
Viewforth Investment Partners is a dedicated European equity boutique, founded by Richard Black in 2018 and manages a highly concentrated portfolio of between eight and 12 European stocks. Richard will be joined at Pacific by partners Edward Wotherspoon and James Ferguson. All will become partners in Pacific’s new European equities division.
As part of the agreement, Pacific will become the investment manager of Viewforth’s existing Cayman fund, which will be renamed to reference the Pacific Viewforth European Equity strategy. Richard Black has been managing this strategy since 2014 and has generated gross outperformance of 3.9% on an annualised basis vs STOXX Europe 600 Index.
The Pacific Viewforth European Equity strategy is primarily aimed at Institutional Investors and Pacific aims to build on its momentum in the US and other markets, led by Pacific’s head of US Institutional Sales, Sebastian Stewart.
The strategy will continue to be managed by Richard and the team, with the same process and philosophy, while Pacific will provide the operational infrastructure, marketing, distribution and technology to allow the investment team to focus on generating returns for investors.
Matthew Lamb, CEO, Pacific Asset Management, said:
“We are really excited to welcome Richard, Edward and James to Pacific Asset Management. Their highly concentrated, specialist and hard-to-industrialise approach epitomises Pacific’s focus on alpha-generating, craft investment management, which can provide genuinely differentiated outperformance for clients. We believe that our new European equity capability and the team’s highly-active, high-conviction investment approach is an outstanding fit for Pacific and our clients.
“We have always understood that managing a truly craft investment portfolio requires total focus. Richard and his team believe passionately that their time is best spent researching stocks and running portfolios without being side-tracked by the day-to-day functions of running a business. Pacific’s unique technology-driven infrastructure will allow them to do exactly that. We are delighted that our significant investment in the structure and foundations of the business from day-one, along with our focus on people, allows us to attract such exceptional talent to the firm.”
Richard Black, Portfolio Manager, Viewforth Investment Partners, added:
“Pacific is a singularly principled, long-termist independent investment management business and has won the trust of a large number of leading global institutional investors. With this partnership we have the mandate, resources and backing to put our heads down and exclusively focus on investing and delivering outstanding risk-adjusted returns. This combination will allow us to focus solely on generating alpha, while Pacific’s best-in class technology and operational resources lift the load of running a regulated investment business. We believe this is the optimal set-up for delivering outlier outperformance for many years to come.”
