Emerging Managers
Partnering with emerging managers is key to our investment strategy
Working with emerging managers—essentially, starting our relationships much earlier than other investors—extends the duration of our manager relationships and allows us to develop deeper, more trusting relationships.
We have been working with emerging managers consistently since 2012, when we invested $5 million with a stock-picking firm that was managing $15 million with no institutional investors. Today, the majority of our top 10 stock-picking firms in the portfolio started as emerging managers.
A decade-plus of partnerships with emerging managers
Below are some statistics on our emerging manager investment activity since 2012, including both public and private managers. Please note these numbers would be much higher if considering only our emerging manager long only stockpickers.
Had fewer than 3 years of track record when we invested
Count MIT as a Day 1 founding partner
Had <$25 million of AUM at hire
Had no other institutional investors
Partnership
Examples
- A one-person stock-picking firm based in Canada with $4 million of AUM and a one-year track record
- A one-person stock-picking firm based in the New York area with a long history of successfully compounding friends and family money full time, but without institutional investors or infrastructure
- A private growth equity firm raising its first institutional fund, based in London and investing across Europe
- A West Coast U.S. hedge fund with several years of successful performance opening to outside capital for the first time, with a strategy that is not a good fit for most institutions
- A West Coast U.S. venture capital firm raising its first institutional fund
- A real estate firm raising its first “proof of concept” fund in a less institutionalized segment of the real estate market
Emerging Manager Resources
We have spent many hours creating and collecting resources for emerging managers at a website we founded called www.emergingmanagers.org, as well as sharing information relevant to emerging managers on Twitter. Please note that for now, the website is tailored more to emerging-manager, public markets stock-picking firms. For example, the website contains:
Emerging Manager Roundtable
The past several years, we hosted a multi-day in-person event in the spring for six to eight recently or soon-to-be-launched funds. The event is targeted at managers with less than $25 million of AUM and many participants launched with single digit millions. The group discussed many topics related to firm building and investing. MITIMCo shared emerging manager case studies from our own experience, and brought now-established but formerly emerging managers in as guest speakers to share mistakes and learnings from their journey. We plan to repeat this event annually in the spring; if you are interested in being selected for the six to eight slots for a future event, please subscribe to our emerging manager website https://emergingmanagers.org/ to be alerted when applications are open.
An interview we did with investment manager Josh Tarasoff
Josh Tarasoff, founder of Greenlea Lane Capital based in Connecticut exemplifies an alternative approach to building a great stockpicking firm.
A list of service providers used by MIT’s emerging manager stockpickers
Choosing service providers is very important, even for the simplest stockpicking operations. At the link below, you will find information about service providers used by emerging managers.
Several examples of low-cost budgets of MIT’s emerging manager stock-pickers
We share three budgets from excellent firms. The first is from a London-based emerging manager MIT partnered with at launch. The second is from a US-based emerging manager MIT partnered with at launch, who started with more substantial AUM. The third is from a US-based emerging manager that MIT is not invested with, but whom we know and admire.