Who we are
Cerno Capital is a multi-asset class investment manager providing advisory and investment management services to individuals, families, educational endowments and charities. We invest globally, across multiple asset classes and take a long term outlook to wealth preservation and growth. Our proprietary Global Leaders strategy forms the bedrock of our equity exposure and conforms to the same philosophy.
With 20 years' experience each in security analysis, institutional brokerage and investment advisory, James Spence and Nicholas Hornby founded Cerno Capital in March 2007. We are a partnership, based in the West End of London, run day to day by the founding partners who are supported by a team of professionals.
What we do
We believe that the best way to grow and preserve wealth with sensitivity to equity market drawdowns is to invest across multiple asset classes. This entails the use of a flexible array of instruments, regulating equity exposure in accordance with valuation and providing natural diversity of return sources through other asset classes, principally fixed income and alternatives. Furthermore, we believe investment allocations should be driven by logic and informed assessments of future returns, not by benchmarks. A global approach with a high level of flexibility provides our investment managers with the greatest probability of generating attractive returns given the resulting wide spectrum of opportunities. With regards to risk, we believe that a global, unconstrained, multi-asset approach should be tempered by a real-world approach to risk, concentrating on the risk of losing money, not just the measurement of volatility.
Our investment philosophy leads us to adopt an investment style which blends top-down assessments of asset classes and markets with bottom-up analysis of assets. We seek to identify the factors most relevant to future asset class returns and then follow a robust, valuation-based methodology for selecting investments. We invest in active investment managers, passive ETFs and directly in securities. We follow a logical decision making process to determine which of these best serves the investment objective. A typical portfolio would contain all three investment vehicles.
