Thank you all for your support. Over the past year many of you have written in to express your interest in what I will be working on next. I have always said that as a subscriber to this website, you will be the first to know when I have something to release publicly. That time is now.

I have founded the investment management company, Maven Funds Management, where I will be the Chief Investment Officer. I will be investing the majority of my family’s total wealth in to the fund, alongside our clients. 

Introducing Maven Funds

As I prepared to leave my prior role as Portfolio Manager of Motley Fool Pro I expected to only manage investments on behalf of my family and close friends. Perhaps over time I would advise a few private clients. 

When I officially announced my departure from Pro that plan began to change. I was blown away by all the messages of support and thanks. Many of you wrote in to share how much you’d developed as investors, and how your family’s financial well-being had improved. Several of you emailed personally to share how your investment portfolio had allowed you to give back to your community, including some incredibly generous gifts to charity. It is a privilege to know that our investment advice had contributed to that in some small way. 

I was honoured and deeply humbled to receive those messages of support, which were easily the highlight of my professional investment career. They also planted the seed for creating something new.

I wanted to take my time to design my ideal investment vehicle for long-term investing. First, because it is important to get the right structure for you, our clients. But also because I knew I would be investing the majority of my family’s wealth in to the fund, and that I would plan to operate it for many years to come. In our view, there are a few problems with the traditional investment management industry that we wanted to address. 

The problem

As the recent Royal Commission demonstrated, the financial services industry is deeply conflicted. Most advisors will happily sell their clients a product that they won’t invest in themselves. Most fund managers are more concerned with protecting their salary than creating value for clients. Most portfolio managers lack the patience to hold for long-term gains, because they are impatiently chasing quarterly returns. 

Setting aside the conflicts, there is also a problem of strategy. Many portfolio managers that invest in growing companies, have no method for how to value a business. They end up overpaying, or over-trading, jumping from one hot momentum stock to the next. Meanwhile many traditional value investors have not adapted to a changing world where wealth-creation is driven by intangible assets like software and networks. Both of these strategy mistakes negatively impact their client’s returns. 

I also knew that I wanted to keep all of the strengths of the Pro portfolio: our investment approach, our patience and long-term focus, our combination of a growth-mindset with valuation discipline, and most importantly our savvy client base. However I wanted to address the challenge of entering and building positions while limiting our price impact.

Our Solution

Maven is different. We adopt an investment strategy that combines high-quality growth businesses, with valuation discipline and smart portfolio management. We invest the majority of our investment team’s personal wealth in to our funds, right alongside you, our clients. Lastly, we will closely monitor the capacity of our fund, and limit our capital base when necessary. 

There are four pillars of our investment approach that you can read more about at the Maven Funds website. For those of you that are former clients, or have been regularly reading this blog, the investment strategy will be very familiar. 

There is one pillar that I would like to dig in to further, which is you, our clients. We are extremely grateful for the support that we have received over the past year. Your long-term focus is the bedrock of our ability to find and hold the champion companies of tomorrow. We have many business owners, professionals and other domain experts amongst our subscriber base. For those willing to share, we will be finding ways to put that collective knowledge to work for the benefit of all of us.

Register your interest 

If Maven Funds Management sounds like it may be of interest to you, I would like to invite you to register your interest today.

Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot more investment research, analysis, attending investment conferences, and sharing video insights. We’ll also get into all the specifics of our fund closer to launch. 

Thank you all for your support and interest, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us here: contact@mavenfunds.com.au.