Approach
The Realist Fund gives investors exposure to “hard assets” benefiting from the global rise in energy demand, currency debasement and the reshoring of critical material supply chains. With technology stocks making up around 50% of the S&P 500 market cap and a AI-related financing dominating private equity (and now also private credit), the Realist Fund provides a long-biased strategy with meaningful diversification from the broader market that is designed to outperform during inflationary periods. Our edge comes from applying industry expertise, bottoms-up research, institutional risk management practices and data science, including generative AI, to finding public equities that outperform the market over time while managing downside volatility. The Fund invests across market capitalizations with a bias towards small and micro-cap companies globally where we see the greatest opportunity for alpha generation in an industry sector that is under-covered by analysts and poorly understood by most investors.
Leadership
Over 50 years of combined investment and risk management experience across major stock market and commodity cycles
Craig Sprosts
Managing Partner & CIO
Craig Sprosts has over 25 years of experience in investment management and enterprise software. Craig started his career at MetLife where he worked as part of a small team that oversaw asset allocation for a multi-billion-dollar portfolio backing the company’s annuity liabilities and helped design and implement a portfolio risk management system used to manage risk for the company’s $100 billion+ investment portfolio. After receiving an MBA from MIT Sloan and interning in sell-side Equity research at Morgan Stanley, Craig moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in technology. Craig spent over 20 years defining enterprise software products and building and leading product teams at Siebel Systems, IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco) and Nominum (acquired by Akamai Technologies). Craig also managed teams of data scientists responsible for using supervised learning and artificial intelligence to detect real-time threats and is co-inventor of nine security-related patents. Craig has spent the last six years managing his family’s assets with a focus on natural resource investing. Informed by his institutional risk management background and over 30 years of personal investing experience including investing through major downturns after the Dot-com bubble and Global Financial Crisis, Craig uses a combination of fundamental and quantitative tools and institutional risk management techniques to uncover opportunities and manage risk.
Matt Fernley
Senior Advisor
Matt Fernley is Editor of Battery Materials Review, a subscription newsletter which covers the battery and battery materials industry, and a Partner at RK Equity. He is also co-presenter of the Recharge podcast and on the Rock Stock Channel. He has become one of the most followed experts on the raw materials necessary for the Energy Transition. Matt has spent over 25 years as an equity and commodity analyst. Starting his career at Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS Investment Bank), he was an equity analyst and also a global strategist for Basic Materials (chemicals, mining, paper, steel, cement/aggregates While at UBS his primary focus was on the secular material demand growth associated with China’s urbanisation event. Following UBS, he spent two years in hedge funds before joining GMP Securities (Europe) LLP as a Senior Mining Analyst and latterly Head of Equities Research. After GMP he took a few years out of the industry before taking up the position of Materials & Cyclicals strategist at Haitong. Most recently, Matt spent five years as Head of Research for an Energy Transition hedge fund advising on industry strategy as well as investments in all segments of the Transition, from raw materials to end markets, on a global basis. Matt has published extensively on batteries, battery materials and the Energy Transition.
.jpg)