The Magic Kingdom's Managers

This week, we’ll take a look at the Disney Retirement Trust’s portfolio. The Walt Disney Company has grown from the cartoon studio Walt and Roy Disney founded in 1923 into one of the world’s largest media and entertainment groups with a market cap of close to $200 billion today.

The Trust is led by Carlos A. Gómez, executive vice president and treasurer at The Walt Disney Company. In his role as treasurer, Gómez oversees the Disney Retirement Trust’s pension investments, in addition to corporate finance and investor relations. Gómez has spent nearly 25 years at Disney, the past six as treasurer.

The Trust manages total assets of $19.1 billion as of 12/31/25. Over the last few years, the Trust’s largest shift in allocation has been toward Treasuries, which now total $6.2 billion, roughly 32% of its total assets.

Within its external fund manager portfolio, the exposure has shifted meaningfully from public managers to private over the past few years. A few public managers that are no longer disclosed include Tybourne and Dalton. Among the manager investments, we estimate that private equity is the largest sleeve at roughly $1 billion, followed by real estate at roughly $500 million and venture capital at roughly $450 million.

The Trust disclosed three new manager relationships in its latest filing – a $76 million holding in PGIM real estate; a $29 million holding in LaSalle Investment Management; and its $28 million holding in AlpInvest’s eighth secondaries fund.

The Trust also discloses a number of investments in funds managed by Makena Capital. As of 12/31/25 its holdings with the OCIO totaled $478 million, including Makena’s private equity fund ($166 million), its venture capital fund ($121 million), and its public developed markets equity fund ($69 million).

In Friday’s newsletter, users received a list of 20 of the Disney Retirement Trust’s manager holdings. One of the Trust’s largest holdings is Cevian Capital, a Stockholm-based activist investor focused on large-cap European companies. The Trust first disclosed an investment in Cevian in 2012 when it invested $100 million. It appears to have invested more capital with the manager at various times since its initial investment, and its holdings are now valued at $339 million as of 12/31/25, according to its filings.

Cevian was founded in 2002 by Lars Förberg and Christer Gardell. Gardell and Förberg first met in 1992 while Gardell was consulting at McKinsey & Company and Förberg was an investment manager at Nordic Capital.

In 1996, Gardell was appointed CEO of Swedish investment company AB Custos and recruited Förberg to join him as CIO. The pair ran the company for 5 years before striking off on their own with Amaranth Capital, which they renamed to Cevian Capital in 2003 when they realized a (soon to be well-known) American firm already had that name. According to the New York Times, they sold the European rights to the Amaranth name for €1 million.

Today, Cevian is one of, if not the largest activist hedge funds in Europe with a regulatory AUM of nearly $18 billion. Its strategy primarily focuses on taking “significant minority ownership positions” in European companies and employs a “proactive, hands-on” approach to drive value creation, according to its website.

“We don’t have a hostile approach; we have a constructive approach,” Gardell told Fortune in a 2015 profile.

“Our strategy is designed to use those flaws of the market, if you wish, where we can act as an owner,” Förberg shared on the Money Maze Podcast in May 2026. The “flaws” he alludes to are the public market investors he calls “very passive, myopic, and under-informed.” Users can see the podcast in Cevian’s feed on OWL.

Cevian counts a number of institutional allocators as disclosed LPs in addition to the Disney Retirement Trust including the Colorado Health Foundation, Florida RS, Kern County ERS, LACERA, Main Line Health, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the Virginia Retirement System, and the Wyoming Retirement System. See Cevian’s full list of disclosed LPs on OWL.

Another Disney manager, Eminence Capital, recently decided to return capital, according to a Bloomberg article.

Recently, OWL was able to identify what we believe is the first post-shutdown spinout from Eminence, before it registered with the SEC. Asch Partners is led Peter Goodson, a former portfolio manager and director of research at Eminence. Goodson spent roughly 15 years at the firm and in June of this year he filed paperwork registering an LLC, a GP, and an LP under the name Asch Partners in New York. OWL users can find Asch, along with more than 1,300 other firms, on our Recent Launches feed.

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.

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.

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