Based in London, AKO Capital is one of Europe’s leading investment partnerships. Founded in 2005 by Nicolai Tangen, AKO Capital manages approximately USD 21.5bn across long-only and long-short equity funds.
We believe that the best way to create strong risk-adjusted return over time is to own the best assets for the long term.
Through a rigorous and proprietary bottom-up investment process we aim to build a portfolio that combines excellent economic characteristics and great management.
We have a long-term investor base that includes many of the world’s leading endowments, charitable foundations, institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds.
From an initial focus on European equities AKO Capital has, since 2013, also managed funds dedicated to Global equities which has enabled a valuable cross-pollination of insights and analyses that benefits all our funds.
AKO Capital was awarded ‘Best European Equity Fund over $500m’ in 2012 by Eurohedge.
Demonstrating consistency of performance, AKO was nominated for the ‘Best European Equity Fund’ and ‘Best New European Fund’ awards in 2006 and for ‘Best European Equity Fund over $500m’ in each of 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The AKO Global Fund was nominated for the ‘Best New Global Fund’ in 2016 and ‘Best Global Equity Fund over $500m’ in 2017 and 2018, winning this award in 2019. The AKO Global UCITS Fund was nominated for the ‘Best New Fund of the Year‘ and the ‘Best Global Equity Fund – 1 Year’ in 2017 and won the awards for ‘Best Global Equity Fund – 1 Year’ and overall ‘Fund of the Year’ at the Eurohedge Absolute UCITS awards in 2018.
Great businesses
We seek to align ourselves with the best quality listed companies in the world. For us that means they can grow, sustainably, faster than the economy or their peers; have true pricing power; enjoy recurring revenues from their customers; and are able and willing to invest counter-cyclically in a downturn, strengthening their long-term advantages. We invest only where we can understand the sustainability of the business model.
Long-term
We believe that quality businesses will sustainably outperform over the longer-term. That is why we also invest for the long-term, to benefit from the compounding of our companies’ earnings.
Management
Quality companies are usually led by high quality management teams. We look to build strong and supportive relationships with our companies, and to share the unique perspectives of our research process.
Proprietary process
The AKO research process is fundamental, data-driven and multi-disciplinary. The experienced equity analysts are supported by specialist research groups covering forensic accounting; behavioural intelligence and interview training; data science and digital analytics; and market research. Each team brings an independent professional perspective to the challenge of identifying, and underwriting, the best quality companies.
Long bias with market hedging
Our focus is on achieving consistently good returns, aiming to beat the market when it goes up and to have a lower drawdown when it goes down. We have a long bias and do not try to protect small market moves, instead using put options as a market hedging overlay.
Alignment
Like us, our clients are also long-term investors, many of them foundations, universities and hospitals that are investing to support regular charitable disbursements from their perpetual capital. The largest owner of AKO Capital is the AKO Foundation, itself a charity, while the partners of the firm are also significantly invested in our funds alongside our clients.