Latitude Investment Management, a start-up boutique investment partnership, celebrates its fifth anniversary this week. Founded in 2016 by Freddie Lait, Latitude has established itself as an innovative and responsible investment manager, while outperforming incumbent managers with consistently strong returns and similar levels of risk since launch.

Freddie Lait, Managing Partner:

There has never been a harder time to start a fund management business, nor has the opportunity, and client need, been as great. The present environment benefits independent boutiques hugely. As we enter a higher inflation environment, those managers with low returns, or over-valued portfolios, will be unable to deliver sufficient protection to weather it. We believe the traditional 60/40 model is broken, and allocators will need to address how they manage the non-equity portion of their portfolio. We also believe absolute return funds and multi-asset funds will play an increasing role in client portfolios in the future, and are committed to delivering these strong returns, while minimising risk.

Patrick Valentine, Partner:

Our stated mission at launch was to build a business which, through innovation and a commitment to consistency, offers a new range of investment solutions to clients throughout market cycles. Innovation in our sector is rare. As incumbent managers grow ever larger, they often fail to improve their investment processes and herein lies the opportunity for start-up boutiques like ours. The recent launch of our Global Equity UCITS demonstrates our team’s ability to generate superior returns from stock picking, without exposing clients to the risk of over valuation within the equity market at present.

Latitude’s flagship fund, the Latitude Horizon Fund, has outperformed many of its peers and is proving a credible disrupter in the multi-asset / absolute returns sectors. Performance is substantially ahead of the largest incumbent peers (such as Ruffer Total Return, Newton Real Return and Troy Trojan), with a five-year annualised return of 7.0% net of fees, 5% ahead of inflation. Designed to reduce risk without compromising performance, the Horizon Fund seeks to offer long-term investors compounding capital appreciation throughout the market cycle and ahead of inflation. A concentrated portfolio of stocks is counterbalanced with a selection of non-equity investments, which
lower the equity risk and enhance return.

The Global Fund invests in a concentrated portfolio of world leading businesses, with a strict focus on valuation. The portfolio trades on an aggregated PE of 15x which is 40% below the market level, and long-term returns for the strategy have been 16% per year. The company has significantly expanded its investment and operations teams since launch and has recently invested in a proprietary firmwide digital solution to manage data flow and investment decisions.