Alvine Capital Podcast

Nate Kirk is the co-founder of Everside Capital Partners, a private credit fund focused on the lower-middle market based in New York City. He founded the firm together with Moritz Poehl in 2016, and was previously a portfolio manager at Third Avenue Management, where he focused on stressed and distressed credit, special situations and flexible credit, and prior to that worked as a Trader and High Yield Credit Researcher at J P Morgan. Our conversation starts with Nate’s early education and the passion that he developed for rowing in his teens and beyond. While he admits that he didn’t always have the “best form” as a rower, his passion, discipline and dedication to the sport distinguished him and taught him the characteristics of grit and perseverance that proved to be useful in the corporate world. We hear about how he had to channel that grit to find his first entry into the world of finance, and about the lessons that the volatility in the financial world presented. These lessons related to client treatment – particularly in times of challenge, dealing with counterparties and seeking pockets of return along the road less traveled. We conclude with reflections on how personal setbacks can lead to a reckoning of what it is that truly matters in life and on the challenges – and rewards of finding a solid work/life balance. Alvine Talks Podcasts are co-hosted by Tom Raber and Aoifinn Devitt and aim to bring a deeper understanding of the people and processes behind the strategies that drive differentiated returns.

Bo Knudsen is the CEO and Global Equity Portfolio Manager at C WorldWide Asset Management. Bo has worked in portfolio management since 1989, marking the start of a distinguished career in global equities. Prior to joining C WorldWide Asset Management in 1994 he worked for five years as a global portfolio manager with Danske Capital in Copenhagen and ultimately held the position as Head of International Equity Investments. In 1998 Bo moved and subsequently joined Nordea Investment management as Executive Director and Head of Equities. He re-joined C WorldWide Asset Management team in 2001 where he has remained ever since. The conversation, hosted by Tom Raber of Alvine Capital, and Aoifinn Devitt, starts with Bo's upbringing in a rural village in Denmark, and his education path to finance. We discuss then his approach to stock picking, hold period and portfolio construction, and how the high conviction approach works for him. We detour a little then in to the political backdrop to investing today and what that means for scenario analysis and forecasting. Our discussion concludes with his life outside investing, and Bo discusses his high conviction and focused approach there.  Alvine Capital is a specialist European placement agent founded in 2005. With offices in London and Stockholm, Alvine seeks to uncover best in class investment managers around the globe and bring them to the European Institutional market.

In this Alvine Talks podcast Tom Raber and Aoifinn Devitt sit down with Bjorn Thelander, who is an experienced Family Office manager with broad international investment and industrial experience.  His background is varied and involved many stints in emerging markets, punctuated by market crises which often necessitated a pivot - or two.  We discuss how this shaped Bjorn in terms of his world view, his appetite for risk and his tolerance for volatility. We then trace his journey through investment banking, investment management, time at food-packaging giant Tetra Laval, a stint as an entrepreneur and his most recent role, as CIO at the James Dyson family office, Weybourne.  He recently left this role and we discuss what the next chapter holds. Bjorn has a wide range of interests and experience, and this is reflected in his taste for "off the run" investments.  We discuss the opportunity in Argentina and the reforms ushered in by Javier Milei, and debate the promise of Bitcoin and other digital assets, where Bjorn has had an early interest. On the personal side we examine Bjorn's competitive nature, his love of sports and recent books and other interests. 

Stephen Isaacs is a strategic advisor to Alvine Capital, and an angel investor who has held a number of roles as non-executive director and chair and is a frequent commentator on macro and economic matters.  We wanted to sit down with him to get insights into his current macro reviews and peel back the layers a little to ask about his approach to the economy and investing and gather some lessons learned from past setbacks. We start by discussing the approach Stephen takes to investing and to distilling macro noise into investable theses. We look at his own biases which get in the way of him being truly long-term, and look at some fixes to protect us from our worst tendencies as investors, which usually involve an overly acute focus on the short term.  Our conversation then goes free-range, we discuss topics as diverse as governance, the upcoming US election, the behaviour of commodities, absolute return funds and traditional portfolio protection hedges.  

Peter Dencik is currently non-executive chairman at Alvine Capital. He has had a long career in finance, having started his career as an economcis rofessor where he worked in two universities in Denmark.  He then spent almost a decade at the PKA – one of Denmark’s largest pension funds, and then moved to London where he held various roles in asset management firms. He currently splits his time between Paris, Stockholm and London. Our conversation traces Peter's movement from academic life into practice and briefly out again. He discusses the challenges and opportunities in running of of Denmark's largest pension funds, and paints a picture of the regulatory backdrop and political landscape at the time.  Moving then to the London phase of his career and his views on leadership, management, governance, the role of the non-executive and other compelling insights. The common thread of humanity, respect for the dignity of every professional and the importance of putting the firm and its shareholders first are lessons for all of us. 

Ian Prideaux was Head of the Grosvenor family investment office for over 16 years until his retirement in 2022. Under his leadership he embarked upon a bold vision of diversification into alternative assets.  He started his career in investment banking. Ian is a long-time friend of Alvine, and Tom and Aoifinn were keen to catch up with him in the aftermath of his retirement to look back at some of the highs and lows of working at such a unique investment entity as Grosvenor.  Our conversation starts with a brief history lessons on the extraordinary origins of the investment pool, and the unique characteristics it held as such a major holder of real estate.  This ultimately directed the investment of the balance, and Ian quite early on won the support of the investment committee to embark upon a bold strategy of diversifying the portfolio. Working alongside Cambridge Associates (which is where he and Aoifinn met) he embarked upon building a private equity and hedge fund portfolio and became a keen participant in manager meetings around the world.  We learn about his schooling in the most complex of investment strategies, and how he matured as an institutional investor.   We conclude with a look into his next phase - in which he has a portfolio career and is enjoying a separate set of interests. We hope you enjoy this joyful retrospective on a job very well done.  

What exactly is Foodtech?  How will advances in technology and data collection transform the nature of farming?  How will our plates of food look in five years time?  What will we be eating and where will we source it from?  What kind of investment opportunity does all of this change present? In this Alvine Capital podcast we aim to demystify the worlds of Foodtech as well as AgTech and meet with Alastair Cooper of Cibus Funds, and Alexander Olesen of Babylon Micro Farms. We first set about defining FoodTech and describing how it intersects with AgTech.  We take the vertical farming model as an example of some of the advances being seen in this area and the positive impact that this has both on supply chains and on resource usage.  We hear then from Alastair Cooper as to the opportunity he sees in investing in a FoodTech focused fund with a venture capital model, and the kind of potential that various segments have. We examine the likely impact of advances in renewable energy, data collection, ESG risk assessments and policy changes on this area, and ask whether the demand for plant-based meat is likely to grow or has already peaked? Finally each of the guests describes their favourite food innovation that is currently not widely known - we hear about the prospects of crop innovation as well as the development of plant-based meat that is flavored with cellular beef fat. There is more information on Cibus Funds here (https://www.admcapital.com/cibus-fund/) and on Babylon Micro-Farms Farms here https://babylonmicrofarms.com/. 

In this special Alvine Capital podcast we aim to demystify some of the lesser well known alternative strategies in the world of investment. Music is all around us - deeply embedded in our culture, our traditions, our first dance, that jingle that we hear on that ad, the memories of that summer. Today we are going to get a little deeper into the business of music royalties. Our guests today are: Neil Gillis – President • President of Round Hill since 2010 • Years of Experience in Music Industry: 37 • Previous Experience: Alfred Music Publishing; S1 Songs America; Dimensional Music Publishing; Warner/Chappell Music; BMI • Education: Hofstra University, BA Barry Massarsky – Founder and President of Massarsky Consulting. Mr. Massarsky's expertise includes music royalty valuation, strategic and analytic counsel for collective rights and trade associations, expert witness litigation in copyright infringement cases, and the music production library marketplace. We start out with a basic question: what are music royalties? We then discuss two genres in particular - Country and American Standard - and talk about their different characteristics. We ask why an artist would sell a catalogue today and whether it is a good time to purchase one. Portfolio construction and cash flow characteristics are important in this area and we ask what a diversified portfolio looks like - by vintage, genre, streaming v. other characteristics). Barry answers the question as to how he values a catalogue and how accurate this has tended to be. We finish with discussing the exit strategy and the characteristics of the return stream from music royalties as an investment. One of the joys of this podcast is the fact that it features so many music excerpts from the catalogue owned by Roundhill Music. There is more information about Alvine Capital, Roundhill Music and Massarksy Consulting on the following websites: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. All views are personal.