OUR sTORY
Zeno Equity Partners is an investment firm based in London. We manage a low-turnover equity portfolio of 20-25 companies predominantly based in the Americas and Europe. We are 100% partner-owned and our investment principles have remained constant since the firm’s inception in 2005.
Zeno Equity Partners is the result of the management buy-out of Dynamo Capital, previously the advisor of the Dynamo Fund, and now called the Zeno Investment Fund.
INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY
Our strategy has been derived from three decades of hard-earned lessons in equity investing. It is informed by the mistakes of our past, by the recognition of our strengths and weaknesses, and by our aim to build a portfolio of resilient businesses that can endure hard times, will thrive over the long-term, and in which we can invest the vast majority our net worth.
Industry dynamics change with macro and micro economic cycles and these changes should impact the composition of our portfolio over time, however, our strategy will not change in the face of capital market’s “cycles of preference” which are, in most cases, driven more by psychology than fundamentals. We are, in essence, subscribers to Warren Buffett’s idea that in the short-term markets are voting machines and in the long-term they are weighing machines. We are not in the business of predicting the outcomes of popularity contests. We simply don’t know how to do it. On the other hand, if we do our jobs right, we should be able to take advantage of the volatile nature of human behaviour to invest in exceptional businesses managed by great people at prices that do not reflect their long-term intrinsic values.
We have an investable universe of approximately 300 companies. We focus on companies that combine Market Power, a Reinvestment Opportunity, and a Founder Mindset, which we define as follows:
- Market Power: the ability to maintain or build a dominant market position in a sustainable way
- Reinvestment Opportunity: the ability to reinvest excess profits at high returns
- Founder Mindset: management who think and act like true long-term owners