Rothschild Portfolio Update

This week, we revisited the portfolio of RIT Capital Partners, the “Publicly Traded Endowment” we previously profiled in 2023 and 2024. In this update, we spotlight a few new manager additions and break down some of the first publicly disclosed asset class returns for 2025, offering an early glimpse into how the year is shaping up.

The Rothschild Investment Trust, also known as RIT Capital Partners, was formed in the 1950s by Jacob Rothschild and was originally associated with the family bank, N.M. Rothschild & Sons. By the 1980s, RIT had become an investment holding company with assets of ~£650 million. After splitting into two entities, RIT Capital Partners was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1988. With nearly $6 billion in assets today, RIT is one of the UK’s largest investment trusts, and the Rothschild family remains the largest shareholder.

Year to date, RIT has seen private investments outperform public equity, hedge funds, and other asset classes:

The direct private sleeve (which includes co-investments made alongside managers) has benefited from the Webull IPO, the sale of RIT’s Xapo investment, and the partial sale of Scale AI to Meta. RIT notes in its June report that the aggregate valuation increase of those exits relative to their December 2024 marks was 112%. Those exits have also increased RIT’s private investment realizations relative to prior years.

Within RIT’s public equity portfolio, gains were driven by Japanese managers as well as direct holdings in European aerospace & defense, partially offset by small/mid-cap companies and biotech. While biotech has seen a rebound post 6/30, RIT’s primary manager in biotech is Baker Brothers, who was not invested in Abivax (featured in our recent Insights).

In Friday’s customer newsletter, we provided a comprehensive list of managers in the RIT portfolio and also noted newly disclosed managers including Bronte and Deem Global.

Bronte Capital

RIT invested in Bronte in the second half of 2024. The firm, founded by John Hempton in 2008, is based in Australia and is named after (and located near) Bronte Beach, which we think ranks highly in terms of places to have an office!

Bronte Capital has grown substantially over the past ~10 years, with AUM increasing from $125 million in 2016 to $1.2 billion in 2024.

Hempton discloses more publicly than the average manager, sharing monthly performance reports and letters on his website. He is also not shy on Twitter, often posting daily updates on how his portfolio fared and engaging in spirited conversations:

Bronte, who also counts MIT as an LP, has generated positive returns over time despite running with a low beta-adjusted net exposure:

As Hempton noted in his year-end 2024 letter, “A rising tide lifts all boats, or so they say. We could add ‘except ours.’ We are short sellers. A rising tide does not lift our boat.”

Bronte focuses on identifying frauds as a part of their short strategy. Below is an excerpt from a job posting they shared, looking for former investigative journalists to help them identify potential fraudulent situations:

“Bronte Capital runs a large diversified short book. We are betting that hundreds of companies (globally) will either fail or disappoint so much that the stock drops 90 plus percent. We often do this by following suspect people.

If for example you worked at a suspect broker (like Stratton Oakmont in the Wolf of Wall Street), and later worked for a gold mining company which claimed to have a large deposit that was never mined, and now you are the CFO of a biotech company we probably want to short that biotech company without even attempting to understand the science.

We are not interested in the writing part of being a journalist. Most of what you write will never see a public airing. But we are very interested in the investigative part.”

On the long side, Bronte has a concentrated portfolio of less controversial companies, which we provided more detail on in Friday’s newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about how to use OWL to monitor managers’ portfolios, reach out!

Other News/Events

• Billions Flow to New Hedge Funds Focused on AI-Related Bets (using OWL data!)

• Allocators Are Betting on Active — But the Numbers May Be Against Them

• Boston Children’s Portfolio Was Designed to Survive ‘Really Questionable Times.’ Now It’s Being Put to the Test.

• Stable Asset Management backs North Ground Capital

• Nature Conservancy hiring Chief Investment Officer

• Quant pioneer Renaissance Technologies' painful summer continued in July

• MassPrim reports 9.6% return for fiscal year as assets top $115 billion

• University of Colorado Foundation posts 10.4% FY return

• Ohio State reports 11.8% FY Return

• UTIMCO Reports 9.7% FY Return

• Colorado Reports 10.4% FY Return

About Old Well Labs

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