Pinnacle Investment Management has announced that five former Stewart Investors senior members are among the founding members of a London-based investment boutique, Aikya Investment Management, which will specialise in emerging markets.
The new investment boutique would be the first European-based affiliate of Pinnacle IM Group (PNI) and Pinnacle would be Aikya’s minority equity partner and provide non-investment support functions including a distribution force of 30 people located in London, New York, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.
The former Stewart Investors team members included Ashish Swarup, Tom Allen, Alan Nesbit, Michael Summers and Alex Khosla while other founding members of the firm were former Fidelity Institutional Asset Management (FIAM) portfolio manager, Rahul Desai, and former Income Partners Asset Management senior analyst, Trevor Fung.
“Since opening our London office in 2018 we have made great in-roads into the European marketplace and we now look forward to supporting the growth of our first European-based affiliate investment manager, said Pinnacle Investment Management managing director, Ian Macoun.
“We believe Pinnacle and Aikya are a natural fit. Both teams have a strong belief that investment excellence is best sustained within an environment of supported independence. We have immense confidence in the capabilities of Aikya’s esteemed investment team.”
Aikya’s flagship global emerging markets strategy would comprise a concentrated portfolio of 30-35 companies, with a focus on buying high-quality companies at sensible valuations, and would apply a holistic approach to judging quality.
The Aikya portfolio was designed with a view to protect downside to capital, while generating healthy long term returns for investors, and it would not allocate capital to industries with negative social utility such as coal, gambling, tobacco and defence equipment makers, the firm said.
The Aikya Global Emerging Markets Strategy was available to eligible investors as a separately managed account (SMA) and would be launching a UCITS ICAV pooled fund in the near future.
