February 2026 Recap

Energy & Cyclicals outperformance + Condire profile

March 10, 2026

OWL’s Energy and Cyclicals group had the strongest performance in February. This follows the group’s strong performance in January, and puts its YTD returns at almost twice the next best-performing group (Brazil). Our REIT, Japan, and Biotech groups also had a good month, while Growth, Tech, and India underperformed. 

As a reminder, the table below is based on our “OWL Groups” – curated lists of over 500 managers frequently found in leading allocators’ portfolios. These lists are categorized by geography, sector, and style, enabling our users to easily monitor groups of managers and their underlying disclosed holdings. All returns shown are estimates based on publicly disclosed holdings.

Condire 

For our users, last Friday’s newsletter included a list of managers that had the best and worst estimated performance in February. One of February’s top performers was Condire Investors, a Dallas-based natural resources investor.

Founded in 2012 by Bradley Shisler and Ryan Schedler, Condire was previously included in our early January newsletter on managers that invested in outperforming gold stocks in 2025. The firm’s portfolio is heavily weighted towards basic materials, which comprised 77% of its disclosed positions as of 2/27/26. Its three largest positions, all of which are gold stocks, make up 43% of its disclosed portfolio. 

Shisler started his career as an engineer in the oil & gas industry before transitioning to private equity as a principal at Willis Stein & Partners. He briefly served as a founding partner of Blue River Partners, a lower-middle market PE firm, before helping spin out veterinary hospital consolidator Blue River Pet Care, where he served on the advisory board. 

Schedler began his career as an officer in the US Army Corp of Engineers before attending Harvard and earning his MBA. He spent a few years at large investment banks including Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers before landing at Trellus Management, where he worked for nine years before co-founding Condire. 

Condire’s more recent performance appears to have been driven partially by its gold exposure – its largest disclosed position in New Gold was up 35% in February – but also by some of its non-gold positions including offshore drilling company Valaris, which makes up 8% of its disclosed portfolio and was up 65% in February. Valaris’ gain was largely due to its acquisition by offshore drilling contractor Transocean for $5.8 billion, which was announced on February 9th . 

Condire initially bought Valaris in 2021 and has traded fairly actively over the past 5 years. Exor, Tensile and Turas are also owners of the stock.

As a reminder, OWL users can see details like the ones above on disclosed buying and selling activity for thousands of managers on our platform. Condire, which now manages $1.2 billion, counts the William T Grant Foundation, Texas Children’s and the Hillman Family Foundations (which we previously profiled in January) as LPs. 

OWL users can access a comprehensive list of Energy & Resources managers using our new manager discovery tool. Filtering by our Energy & Resources tag yields 364 managers across all asset classes, which can then be filtered by factors including AUM, location, estimated performance (for public managers), and disclosed LPs. Below is a subset of that list (including Condire), sorted by 5-year returns:

 

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About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.