CEO Letter
“O Vast Rondure”
My father was a literature professor—an artist. My mother was a medical
technologist—a scientist. Given our industry’s obsession with these two attributes in
delivering the best investment results, we turned to my parent’s wonderful traits to help
create a name for our new firm that we felt was enduring and representative of what we
want to accomplish (yes, we know it is hard to pronounce, and I don’t speak French
either). The name Rondure comes from a French word meaning round or spherical. It
is often used to refer to the world or the globe. Rondure is a word used in the writings
of such classical writers as William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. Whitman’s use of
the word in the poem, “A Passage to India,” is what ultimately led to a team-based
selection of the firm name. A “Passage to India” from Leaves of Grass is an homage to
explorers that reflects on the accomplishments of the past and the marks left on the
world, but the poem is also a call to the future and the potential of humans to create,
change, and improve.
Whitman was the ultimate “free verse” poet, and it is our goal as a firm to be
different. We strive to be active, index agnostic, long-term, and cost conscious, but we
want to do this by applying a rigorous boots-on-the-ground approach to investing. From
seeing the world around us in our travels, we also have a strong, perhaps naïve belief
that the world can and should be a better place for all. We hope to have a positive
impact through compassion and charity. With this initial introduction to our name, I
would like to now turn to a deeper look at our values, process, and approach to
investing—our new explorations as a start-up global investment firm and why you
should consider us.
I’m often asked why I left Wasatch. The simple answer is I wanted more control
of the end results for clients, and I had an entrepreneurial bug. I wasn’t ready to exit
global investing. I love it. I can’t imagine having a better, more interesting career. I’ve
been lucky to get to do what I love. I started in this industry as a client relation’s
representative. I have and never will forget my time on the phones dialoguing with all
levels of clients. The lesson is and always will be that this is not our/my money, it’s
yours. It is your dreams and goals we need to deliver. You deserve the utmost
transparency from us. It is our goal to provide this. Our beliefs are simple. We are
136 South Main St, Suite 720 | Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801.736.8500 | www.rondureglobal.com
here for you not for us. We believe costs matter. They directly impact your results, and
hence, we will strive to provide value by focusing on fair-to-better fees and on what we
spend when we travel and work. In addition, we believe we should be heavily invested
with you. I will be placing a substantial portion of my assets in our initial funds and
reserving capital on the side as a commitment to the business to make sure we are here
for you for the long run. We are also putting in place a unique structure, where, if there
is money to award for bonuses and our performance warrants compensation, a part of
that compensation (or all of it in the case of someone like me who has substantial
responsibility for your assets) will be invested and deferred in the mutual fund
strategies. We believe if you win, we win, and if you don’t, we shouldn’t over the longterm.
As for the process at Rondure, it is not new; it is the same one I learned almost
two decades ago from my original mentors at American Century and that was enhanced
and practiced for years during my long tenure at Wasatch Advisors. I have now
covered all asset classes from mega cap to microcap, US to international, emerging to
frontier. I’ve worked consistently using one approach to all these asset classes—a
focus on bottom up, deep due diligence investing with the goal of selecting the highestquality companies at reasonable prices—a margin of safety. The process is the same
across strategies and has been followed by the entire team. At Rondure, we will invest
in these same core companies. Our investment process seeks to find high-quality
companies with a focus on sustainable returns over a long-time horizon, and we expect
to pay a reasonable price for those companies. We buy good companies at great prices
and great companies at good prices all over the world. We focus on risk and return.
I’ve had an amazing set of mentors throughout my almost two decade long
career. My investment philosophy reflects that great mentoring, whether from books or
from practitioners who embraced and taught their philosophies to a new generation. It
is a bit of Warren Buffett, a bit of Benjamin Graham, a bit of Philip Fisher, and a bit of
Wasatch and a bit of Grandeur Peak since Robert Gardiner and Blake Walker were also
my mentors and partners during their tenure at Wasatch. I hope to be a good mentor of
this process and philosophy to create an enduring firm for Rondure's future investors.
We, like Walt Whitman, strive to follow an unconstrained, free verse approach to
investing. We seek to be different—active, the anti-index. Our global perspective is
index agnostic and our style is all capitalization. We believe a “go-anywhere” approach
is the key to finding the best long-term investment opportunities around the world. The
136 South Main St, Suite 720 | Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801.736.8500 | www.rondureglobal.com
bigger the haystack, the harder we search. We will have high active share. We expect
performance to vary widely from the index from year-to-year with a focus on long-term,
risk-mitigated returns for clients over long durations. We expect to do better in down
markets, as we focus on high-quality companies. We will do our best to capture a
decent amount of upside in strong markets, but our goal is to focus on returns through
the cycles over long periods of time. We will manage risk through a focus on quality
companies with good balance sheets, cash flows and sustainable not heroic growth,
paying a reasonable multiple with a margin of safety applied. Our portfolio management
philosophy is to run diversified portfolios, which are agnostic of industry and country
weights in the index. Indices are momentum vehicles, and while they provide cheap
access, they may not provide the best risk mitigation for long-term investors or the best
balance of countries for diversification. We will strive to be different—active, anti-index.
We are bottom up, deep due diligence investors. We screen rigorously. We
travel. We build models, and we assemble our portfolios one stock and one country at
a time. We’ve been running this process since I started my investment career years
ago. Finding needles requires discipline and a stringent, time-tested process with a
great team of people. The key to success is not one person but a great team of people,
who will work to find the best companies around the world through a global research
lens. Our global research lens will focus on constructing a portfolio of good to great
companies, which should also result in low turnover. We are not traders. We are not
short-term investors. We are not momentum oriented. We believe in long-term
sustainable results.
We believe one of our key competitive advantages is our partnership with
Grandeur Peak. While I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, I also recognized that
I needed a great business team to help accomplish this. Grandeur Peak has a deep,
thoughtful, and experienced business team with Eric Huefner, a former Wasatch
partner, steering the ship, so the Rondure team can focus on investments. While I am
named CEO, the intent of having the two entities is for me to focus on investments not
management, and that is possible thanks to this experienced group of business
people. We could not be doing this without them. Putting in place this unique
partnership has your success as its goal.
What is also critical here is I get to work with a number of experienced and
talented research people who I have known and worked with for years. Many of them
are from my days at Wasatch. I’m so excited to be working with all of them again. They
136 South Main St, Suite 720 | Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801.736.8500 | www.rondureglobal.com
are helping me achieve my dreams and the comprehensive value of both entities is a
firm commitment to try and help you achieve yours. The collaboration gives you an
experienced team of people—investors and business people—from day one. I have
traveled with Grandeur Peak team now on two research trips. The first was to Turkey
with Zach Larkin, an experienced analyst from my Wasatch days, and Jonathon Fulton,
an extremely talented Industrials analyst. I’m now on a multi-country trip to Asia with
other members of the Grandeur Peak team. To me, Rondure is the best of both
worlds. It feels, new and fresh and entrepreneurial, but it is with a team of people, who
embrace doing the best global research and who have experience finding the most
unique global companies. I believe it will be hard to beat the travel and bottom up
research that can be accomplished through the two entities in collaboration with the
ultimate goal of best-in-class global investing.
On a final note, one of our other values is a strong belief in human
beings. Whitman wrote extensively about the potential contributions of the poet and
humans to the future. We want to create a world-class research team and a melting pot
for talent. We seek artists, scientists, economists, journalists, and mathematicians
among a few types from all corners of the world to help achieve the best results. This is
a human capital business. One of the mechanisms we will use to encourage creativity
is a journal of our travels, stock picks, thoughts or any of the other topics that would be
written in a diary. These thoughts are not simply my thoughts, but we welcome the
entire team to create and explore the world with transparent and honest thoughts to our
clients. The purpose of our journals is not a deep dive into our team and process—we
intend to do this in our CEO and/or quarterly letters--but to take you on our journeys
throughout the world. The journal is meant to be simple palm-of-hand stories—bedtime
stories and glimpses of what we do and how we think creatively. In this same vein, we
believe all human beings want recognition for their work. We intend to use our website
our letters and our presentations to be inclusive, to represent and include the views of
all of our people. We believe through inclusion, we will get the best and brightest in
research. We don’t want groupthink, and we do want creative, constructive criticism
that will lead to the best portfolios for you. No one should be hidden or silent at
Rondure.
I currently have two analysts working with me and I welcome you to explore the
experience of Benjamin Sain and Akeem Bailey on our website. I worked with Ben at
Wasatch Advisors and he’s the one who came up with our name; Akeem was formerly a
136 South Main St, Suite 720 | Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801.736.8500 | www.rondureglobal.com
member of Arisaig’s great consumer team and came highly recommended from a
talented colleague at Wasatch. We will be looking to expand the team to 5-7 members
as the year progresses to expand our regional geographic coverage. At the start,
Benjamin is supporting me on the Overseas strategy, and Akeem is working on New
World strategy to help uncover the best ideas. All types welcome to apply!
In conclusion, I would be completely remiss in not recognizing Wasatch Advisors,
as a place where many of us at both Grandeur Peak and Rondure Global spent a
number of great years. One of the other major reasons we selected the word, rondure,
from Whitman’s poem was that in Whitman’s reflections on the world, he looks back at
the Wasatch Mountains. Just as in the poem, we believe our heritage and history are
important in establishing a process and gaining fantastic experience. We embrace all of
the best things we learned at Wasatch and wish their team great and many years of
success. We also want to look to the future to “the vast rondure” of opportunities
available to do and create something new and different. We have outlined our vision
above. We believe we are establishing something new with a strong commitment to
clients and an index agnostic, cost disciplined, time tested approach to investing.
We are active. We are different. We are here for you. We embrace our
people. We embrace compassion and charity. We are disciplined. We are longterm. We are boots on the ground, hard-core globetrotters. We believe our costs
matter for your returns. We do this with two teams that have a long-term tenure of
working together and a mission of creating best-in-class research. Grandeur Peak is
helping me achieve my dreams. It is our goal to help you achieve yours. We, like
Whitman, embrace exploration, creativity, and free verse investing through a disciplined,
core, rigorous and diversified and risk-mitigated process and portfolio construction. We
see all of these attributes as core to our competitive advantage.
Thank you for your time!
Laura
Laura Geritz
Founder & CEO
Rondure Global Advisors
136 South Main St, Suite 720 | Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801.736.8500 | www.rondureglobal.com