Rothschild's Publicly Traded Endowment - 2026 Update

This week we’re revisiting the portfolio of RIT Capital Partners, the “Publicly Traded Endowment” we previously profiled in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

The Rothschild Investment Trust was formed in 1971 by Jacob Rothschild and was originally associated with the family bank, N.M. Rothschild & Sons. After splitting the two entities, RIT Capital Partners was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1988. With a market cap of roughly £3.2 billion (~$4.2 billion) and net assets of £4.3 billion (~$5.8 billion) today, RIT is one of the UK’s largest investment trusts, and the Rothschild family remains the largest shareholder.

Maggie Fanari, who joined from Ontario Teachers’ in March 2024, is now two and a half years into the CEO role, and reportedly oversees much of its investments following the departure of CIO Nick Khuu last June.

Without a dedicated CIO much of the investment responsibility falls on RIT’s strategy heads. Richard Lam, who joined in 2025, serves as global head of private funds; Simon Pitcher, who joined in 2012, serves as global head of direct private investments; Hitesh Haria joined as an analyst in 2013 and was named global head of equity funds in June 2025; Shahid Ikram, who joined in 2017, serves as head of macro strategy; Fahad Siddiqi rejoined as head of direct equities in October 2025 after serving in the same role from 2009 to 2019; and Alex Chalikiopoulos, who joined in February 2026, serves as head of absolute return and credit.

RIT groups its investments into three buckets – quoted equities, private investments, and uncorrelated strategies. Year to date, RIT’s private investments have outperformed public equity, hedge funds, and other asset classes, with every asset class generating positive returns so far:

RIT notes that a large portion of its direct private investment returns were driven by the SpaceX IPO. In her June 2026 letter, Fanari writes, “at the point of IPO, our investment in SpaceX produced an unrealized gain of £110m, or 4.0x our invested capital in the Private Investments pillar,” though she does not disclose how much, if any, of that stake RIT exited. At the time of the IPO, RIT’s stake in SpaceX was moved to its quoted equities bucket and was valued at £189.5 million (~$254 million) as of June 30^th, accounting for 4.4% of RIT’s NAV.

RIT also disclosed that it holds direct stakes in Anthropic, Databricks, and Dandy, all of which saw increased valuations in H1 2026, and invested in two new late-stage private companies – Cognition and Stripe. RIT also notes that it increased its investments in both Anthropic and Databricks in recent months.

As of June 30^th, RIT’s direct private investment portfolio was valued at £441.6 million (~$591 million), comprised of the following:

In Friday’s customer newsletter, OWL users received a detailed view of RIT’s private fund portfolio, which is heavily weighted towards venture capital. We noted that RIT contributed additional capital to Hunter Point, Ribbit, and Founders Fund during the first half of 2026. It also disclosed a new investment in Y Combinator.

OWL recently added private fund returns to our data, including IRR, TVPI, or DPI across more than 8,500 funds. These returns are publicly disclosed across hundreds of pensions and endowments and are now available to OWL users. Below are some of RIT’s higher performing private fund holdings from the past few years:

One of RIT’s disclosed public managers is Deem Global. Based in London, Deem Global is a Europe-focused macro investor founded in 2022 by former Brevan Howard money manager Asfandyar Nadeem. Nadeem rose to lead Brevan Howard’s global macro special opportunities strategy before departing to manage money for private investors for the next few years before launching Deem.

RIT first disclosed an investment in Deem in its June 2025 report valued at £14.1 million (~$19 million) as of 6/30/25, and its disclosed value has risen to £35.2 (~$47 million) million as of 6/30/26. RIT places Deem in its uncorrelated strategies bucket, and Deem accounts for 0.8% of RIT’s NAV as of 6/30/26.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Deem would be closing to new capital on March 1^st as it expected to reach $3 billion in assets around that time, up from assets of $300 million at launch.

“Despite the medium-term capacity of our strategy being higher, the reason for soft closing is to remain prudent and maintain a deliberate, phased approach to scaling the business,” Deem said in an investor letter seen by Bloomberg at the time.

In that same investor letter, Nadeem expounded on his strategy amid ongoing geopolitical upheaval.

“This is why the current environment is so rich. It is global, differentiated, and deeply structural. And it rewards those willing to think seriously about governments — not as background noise, but as the primary drivers of markets once again,” he wrote.

Just a few months later, Bloomberg reported that the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, an independently-run arm of the nation’s sovereign wealth fund , had invested $1 billion into Deem before it closed to new capital, bringing its total assets to roughly $3.8 billion as of July.

Both Deem and the ADIC declined to provide Bloomberg comment on the investment, but a representative for the ADIC referred the news outlet to a previous statement from the fund where it said it sees continued value in hedge fund strategies “that can provide diversification, downside protection, and attractive risk-adjusted returns across market cycles.”

Bloomberg added that Deem expects to open to new cash again at the start of next year.

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