Thematic Investors: High Ground Investment Management on the Pathology of Long-Short Investing

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What fuels the curiosity and drive to become a great investor? Could it be early teenage stock market experiments that return 20% or simply being bored in the UK’s equivalent of Iowa, allowing you to take deeper dives into company annual reports during summer breaks? Edgar Allen began his own investment career, fueled by these experiences, as well as through his studies as a budding pathologist. However, as many allocators experience coming out of the university system, a career change to finance was calling, which Fidelity Investments helped him realize.
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In this episode of Thematic Investors, we welcome Edgar Allen, CIO and Founder, High Ground Investment Management. Edgar runs a long-short equity fund focused on European investing (this builds on past Thematic’s Investor podcasts with Johnny de la Hey and Stuart Mitchell - so be sure to check those out as well).

Edgar and Kieran discuss value investing and how players can approach some of these counter trends across the market.

Key Takeaways:

How being assigned the most random group of companies to analyze at the start of his investment career led to larger groupings of well-known names, and into hedge fund investing.

How you begin to balance investment targets by buying low and selling high, against something that is fundamentally cheap, and how much the market has mispriced the asset's terminal value.

What does competition mean in short-selling when the target has a really good product or service?

How do Europe and the US differ in terms of return profiles on investment, dividends, valuations, and why there might be greater advantages in European companies than US peers?

What does European defense spending mean for the team at High Ground Investment Management when they look at valuations and durations?

Why is it important to Edgar to go beyond pure spreadsheet numbers on investment targets to understand more about what a company does and why customers are willing to pay for the product and service that they receive?

How investing ideas can be aligned with the fall of Carthage, as well as the three-age system.

And more!

About Edgar Allen:

Edgar Allen is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of High Ground Investment Management, based in London. Prior to establishing High Ground, he worked at The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), Fidelity, and BlackRock. Edgar brings over 25 years of investment experience and focuses on European equities through a long-short strategy that combines deep fundamental analysis with disciplined valuation and risk control.

About Kieran Cavanna:

Kieran Cavanna is the Co-Founder and CIO of Old Farm Partners. Old Farm is a hedge fund allocation firm focusing on small and mid-sized hedge funds, as well as co-investment opportunities with $600m under management. Prior to Old Farm, Mr. Cavanna worked at Soros Fund Management where he served as the Head of the External Manager Selection team. Mr. Cavanna and his team performed due diligence on and allocated to a select group of hedge funds that deployed a wide variety of hedge fund strategies. Prior to Soros, Kieran was a Partner and the Head of Research at Titan Advisors, a $5b fund-of-hedge funds. In total Mr. Cavanna has been allocating to hedge funds for 18 years. Mr. Cavanna started his financial career at KPMG Consulting as Senior Analyst. Mr. Cavanna graduated from the University of Richmond with a BA and received an MBA from Vanderbilt University.