Emerging Manager – Why we make time for this portion of the market?

Chloe Dagnell, Principal at Isomer was asked to give the keynote speech at Flourish Partners Ltd x Carta‘s Emerging Manager event.

Whilst the event focused on the operational side of running a fund – the part that most emerging managers have not done before – At Isomer Capital we get asked time and time again why we make time for this portion of the market, why we focus on managers with smaller fund sizes, and why we have a programme to invest in micro funds.

📊1. An oldie but a goldie – this Cambridge Associates chart showing time and time again that the top performing funds are often Emerging Managers

📊2. A great chart by James Heath using PitchBook data, showing the majority of top performers were sub $100m in size, and if not, sub $200m

📊3. Data kindly shared from Hugo at Carta, showing the pronounced over performance of funds sub $25m in size in the 90th percentile. A closer look at the chart shows you better be a good picker when it comes to these micro funds, as there’s quite a disparity in performance. It’s why we at Isomer run a programme to surface the best, have an open door to speak to all emerging European GPs, and spend far too much time discussing this great layer of new GP talent internally!