Thematic Investors

Accounting for roughly $45 trillion of global GDP, Asian markets offer hedge fund investors compelling opportunities shaped by US-China decoupling and regional corporate governance reforms. While AI dominates headlines, a look beneath the surface across Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and India reveals far richer opportunities—making a disciplined regional playbook essential.

In our latest Thematic Investors podcast, host Kieran Cavanna welcomes Andrew Nash-Webber, Managing Partner, Highwest Global Management. Nash shares his perspective on what makes this region unique for investors and outlines durable plays that can deliver strong portfolio tailwinds.

Key highlights on this discussion include:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with Andrew Nash-Webber:

About Andrew Nash-Webber:

Andrew Nash-Webber is the Founder of Highwest Global Management, an investment firm focused on publicly traded companies across the Asia-Pacific region. He began his investment career in Hong Kong, where he spent 11 years with Ward Ferry Management, eventually serving as co-CIO before launching Highwest in 2019. His investment approach focuses on concentrated, long-term positions and themes including corporate governance reform, geopolitical shifts, healthcare, technology, industrials, and financial services across Asian markets.

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The demand dynamic for US power growth is significantly accelerating, with spending on new generation assets – necessary to keep pace – nearing $350B over the next five years. This presents a tremendous opportunity for institutional investors focused on the total energy complex and its ripple effects across infrastructure, commodities, and more. From a policy standpoint, flexibility will be key to ensure build-outs, regulation reforms, and energy supply chains are all interconnected.

In our latest episode of the Thematic Investors podcast, we welcome two experts who live and breathe the world of energy today, each with their own perspectives on investing, regulation, affordability, and reliability. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on what it will take to power American infrastructure and the target areas for investment in the near future:

Key takeaways from this discussion include:

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Connect with Ravi Bellur:

Connect with Peter Lake:

About Ravi Bellur:

Ravi Bellur is the Portfolio Manager and Founder of Ripple Effect Asset Management, a New York-based hedge fund focused on investment opportunities across energy, mobility, industrials, and infrastructure. Before launching Ripple Effect, he held investment roles at Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and PointState Capital, where he developed extensive experience analyzing global energy markets and real asset investments. Ravi is known for connecting long-term trends across power generation, industrial growth, and emerging technologies to identify investment opportunities shaped by changes in the global economy.

About Peter Lake:

Chairman Lake currently leads power grid policy at the White House as Senior Director of Power at the National Energy Dominance Council. The advisory work at his consulting firm Cardinal Rose will be inactive during his time at the White House.

As one of the few executives to serve as the highest-ranking government official in both power (PUCT/ERCOT) and water (TWDB) in a top ten global economy (Texas), Chairman Lake has led multiple organizations through some of the largest crises in recent American history. His decisive leadership under intense pressure and unrelenting media scrutiny delivered sensible solutions and systemic change previously regarded by many as impossible. By addressing some of the most complex problems in two of the economy’s most critical sectors, he has established a reputation as one of the world’s go-to agents of meaningful change.

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The world is changing rapidly as it searches for new energy alternatives to meet the growing demand of data centers, electric vehicles and to reduce carbon emissions. Add in geopolitics around Ukraine and Iran, and the infrastructure of energy supply lines becomes less stable. Given this landscape, how can thematic investors optimize portfolio strategies to generate returns across both energy and infrastructure?

In this episode of the Thematic Investors podcast, host Kieran Cavanna sits down with Roland Vetter, Portfolio Manager at Envestra Capital, to get the pulse of Europe’s energy transition and infrastructure landscape. How does this landscape compare and contrast with the Trump administration’s goals, and how deep does the level of interconnectiveness stretch across investment opportunities?

Additional takeaways from this discussion cover:​

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with Roland Vetter:

About Roland Vetter:

Roland Vetter is a Portfolio Manager at Envestra Capital, where he manages a long-only investment strategy focused on energy transition and infrastructure opportunities. With a background in mechanical engineering and energy economics, Roland began his career at Siemens Energy before transitioning into finance through an MBA. He spent four years at Morgan Stanley on the sell side before moving into asset management, where he has navigated multiple market cycles across both long/short and long-only strategies. His combination of technical expertise and investment experience provides a unique perspective on the companies, technologies, and infrastructure driving the future of global energy markets.

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The early days of hedge funds can be described as somewhat akin to the Wild West, characterized by limited information flow, higher volatility, and the risk of losing focus that could easily derail any performance gains made. Today, the industry is run more efficiently with improved information flows and regulatory oversight, which cuts down on the “nefarious characters” that have existed in the past.  

In this latest episode of the Thematic Investors podcast, host Kieran Cavanna, welcomes George Fox, Principal & President, Titan Advisors, LLC, to discuss his career and how removing your ego and hubris from running a hedge fund business is a great first step toward success.

Additional highlights from this discussion include:

Titan Disclaimer:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with George Fox:

About George Fox:

George Fox has been investing in hedge funds for over 30 years and leads Titan Advisors as its President. He is responsible for Titan’s business development efforts and actively engages in the firm’s research and portfolio management process as a member of the Investment Committee. George entered the New York financial markets in 1984 as a floor trader at the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange and at Commodity Exchange Inc., where he traded for his own account for seven years. In 1992, he created G. Fox & Co., a hedge fund advisory firm and the predecessor to Titan Advisors.  In December 2000, after years of commodities trading and advising investors on hedge fund allocations, George Fox launched Titan Advisors, LLC.  George graduated with a B.A. from Tulane University in 1981 and earned a law degree from the University of Richmond (VA) in 1984.

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Many successful careers in institutional investing are forged early from a high degree of passion, curiosity, and discipline in the space. These traits accelerate your learning curve and help you build a network that keeps you competitive over the long term. For those investors specializing in emerging markets, you add a focus on politics and whether leaders in those markets can actually implement the policies underpinning your investment thesis. In this sector, favorable economics won’t always save the day if the politics turn south.

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with Robert Citrone:

About Robert Citrone:

Robert Citrone is the Founder and Portfolio Manager of Discovery Capital, a global macro investment firm he launched in 1999. With more than three decades of experience, he has built a career focused on emerging and developed markets, combining political analysis, policy insight, and fundamental research across equities, currencies, rates, and credit. Prior to founding Discovery Capital, Robert worked at Fidelity Investments, where he helped establish its emerging markets fixed income and currency group, and previously spent time at Tiger Management. He is known for his global perspective, extensive on the ground experience, and long standing relationships with policymakers and market participants around the world.

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What fuels the curiosity and drive to become a great investor? Could it be early teenage stock market experiments that return 20% or simply being bored in the UK’s equivalent of Iowa, allowing you to take deeper dives into company annual reports during summer breaks? Edgar Allen began his own investment career, fueled by these experiences, as well as through his studies as a budding pathologist. However, as many allocators experience coming out of the university system, a career change to finance was calling, which Fidelity Investments helped him realize.

In this episode of Thematic Investors, we welcome Edgar Allen, CIO and Founder, High Ground Investment Management. Edgar runs a long-short equity fund focused on European investing (this builds on past Thematic’s Investor podcasts with Johnny de la Hey and Stuart Mitchell – so be sure to check those out as well). 

Key Takeaways:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with Edgar Allen:

About Edgar Allen:

Edgar Allen is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of High Ground Investment Management, based in London. Prior to establishing High Ground, he worked at The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), Fidelity, and BlackRock. Edgar brings over 25 years of investment experience and focuses on European equities through a long-short strategy that combines deep fundamental analysis with disciplined valuation and risk control.

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Throughout many of our past episodes on the Thematic Investors podcast, we have seen the differences in hedge fund investing strategies when East meets West. Given today’s trade and tariff environment, we wanted to expand the debate with two leading macro investors, pulling their insights on tariffs, U.S. exceptionalism, capital expenditures in areas like AI, and more.

We are honored to welcome Ronnie Roy, Founder and CEO of RV Capital, and Zach Kurz, Founder and CIO of PinnBrook Capital. In this episode, host Kieran Cavanna discusses the following topics with Ronnie and Zach:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Connect with Zach Kurz:

Connect with Ronnie Roy:

About Zach Kurz:

Zach Kurz is the portfolio manager of PinnBrook Capital, a New York–based macro firm managing roughly $600 million in its macro strategy. His path runs from Princeton (economics and applied math) to an early stint at Morgan Stanley, then to Duquesne Capital under Stan Druckenmiller, where he absorbed a liquidity-first view of global markets. He helped launch PointState Capital in 2011, building out the macro business, and in 2020 started his own firm. Today, his approach blends macro with thematic equity investing grounded in that training.

About Ronnie Roy:

Ronnie Roy is the co-founder and portfolio manager of RV Capital in Singapore, an Asia-centric macro firm specializing in rates, FX, and credit that was launched in 2011 and now operates with a global footprint. After years in large institutions, he set out to manage his own capital and then external capital, drawing on a career spent across fixed income markets and co-founding RV. He started on India’s government bond desk in the early 1990s and went on to trade through major dislocations, including the Asian crisis and the LTCM collapse, experiences that shaped his risk framework and macro lens.

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Investing in healthcare and biotech requires razor-sharp models, especially if you want to create more opportunities in this category through short selling. In today’s market, how can investors capitalize on short opportunities when AI, external Medicare Service pressure, policy regulation, and other factors are impacting healthcare investment targets and potentially derailing performance returns?

In our latest episode of the Thematic Investors podcast, we sit down with one of the great under-the-radar investors who has taken $3MM in AUM and has built it into a $1 BN firm. Join us in welcoming Dr. Michael Castor, CIO and Portfolio Manager, Sio Capital Management. Kieran and Michael discuss:

Connect with Michael Castor:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

About Our Guest:

Michael founded Sio Capital Management in 2006 and has served as the portfolio manager since the Firm’s inception. Before starting Sio, Michael worked at Bernstein Investment Research and Management from October 2001 to February 2006 as Bernstein’s healthcare analyst. Michael was responsible for covering all sectors of healthcare globally. In addition to evaluating long investments, he identified healthcare short investments for several of Bernstein’s hedge funds. When Bernstein launched sector portfolios (an internal Bernstein product launched in 2003), Michael served as the healthcare sector leader.

Prior to Bernstein, Michael worked in the investment banking/equity capital markets division of JP Morgan, where he focused on biotechnology and healthcare equity offerings.

Before entering finance, Michael spent three years in clinical medicine. He completed his surgery internship at Indiana University Medical Center, followed by two years of surgery and otolaryngology residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Michael earned a MD from The Ohio State University College of Medicine, where he graduated summa cum laude. He earned his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Tulane University where he graduated summa cum laude with departmental honors.

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With the ongoing volatility of tariffs and trade wars, many institutional investors are looking towards the safe havens of precious metals and critical materials. These include gold, silver, palladium, uranium, and more. However, in many cases, these metals are not designed for rapid price increases. In 2025, we’re already seeing gold having a huge run, but will it continue? 

In this latest entry for the Thematic Investors podcast, hosted by Kieran Cavanna, we welcome the CEO of Sprott Asset Management, John Ciampaglia. John has been a part of the asset management industry for thirty years, having spent the last 15 years at Sprott. 

In this podcast, John highlights:

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

Kieran Cavanna is the Co-Founder and CIO of Old Farm Partners. Old Farm is a hedge fund allocation firm focusing on small and mid-sized hedge funds, as well as co-investment opportunities with $600m under management.  Prior to Old Farm, Mr. Cavanna worked at Soros Fund Management where he served as the Head of the External Manager Selection team. Mr. Cavanna and his team performed due diligence on and allocated to a select group of hedge funds that deployed a wide variety of hedge fund strategies.  Prior to Soros, Kieran was a Partner and the Head of Research at Titan Advisors, a $5b fund-of-hedge funds. In total Mr. Cavanna has been allocating to hedge funds for 18 years. Mr. Cavanna started his financial career at KPMG Consulting as Senior Analyst. Mr. Cavanna graduated from the University of Richmond with a BA and received an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Connect with John Ciampaglia:

John Ciampaglia has over 30 years of investment industry experience and since 2017 has served as Chief Executive Officer of Sprott Asset Management and as Senior Managing Partner of Sprott Inc. He is responsible for overseeing Sprott’s public market investment strategies and is also the Portfolio Manager for the company’s physical commodity funds. John plays an active role in the development of new investment strategies, acquisitions, marketing, and strategic partnerships.  Before joining Sprott in 2010, he was a Senior Executive at Invesco Canada and held the position of Senior Vice President, Product Development. Prior to joining Invesco Canada, he spent more than four years at TD Asset Management. Mr. Ciampaglia earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from York University, is a CFA® charterholder, and a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute.

Sprott Physical Gold Trust (the “Trust”) is a closed-end fund established under the laws of the Province of Ontario in Canada. The Trust is available to U.S. investors by way of a listing on the NYSE Arca pursuant to the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Trust is not registered as an investment company under the U.S. Investment Company Act of 1940.

The Trust is generally exposed to the multiple risks that have been identified and described in the prospectus, which should be referred to and read carefully.

Relative to other sectors, precious metals and natural resources investments have higher headline risk and are more sensitive to changes in economic data, political or regulatory events, and underlying commodity price fluctuations. Risks related to extraction, storage and liquidity should also be considered.

Gold and precious metals are referred to with terms of art like “store of value”, “safe haven”, “portfolio insurance”, and “safe asset”. These terms should not be construed to guarantee any form of investment safety or insurance.  While “safe” assets like gold, Treasuries, money market funds and cash generally do not carry a high risk of loss relative to other asset classes, any asset may lose value, which may involve the complete loss of invested principal.

 Past performance is no guarantee of future results. You cannot invest directly in an index. Investments, commentary and opinions are unique and may not be reflective of any other Sprott entity or affiliate. Forward-looking language should not be construed as predictive. While third-party sources are believed to be reliable, Sprott makes no guarantee as to their accuracy or timeliness. This information does not constitute an offer or solicitation and may not be relied upon or considered to be the rendering of tax, legal, accounting or professional advice.

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As the fiscal brakes start to come off of Europe, how can investors begin to take advantage of investment opportunities that are on the horizon? Many viewed the early days of the Trump presidency as negative, but could that view shift as pressure increases to move Europe closer together? Early movements are pointing towards a union of capital markets and banking, which could result in the breaking of financial barriers that have frozen Europe’s growth in recent years.

In this episode, Kieran Cavanna, CIO, Old Farm Partners and host of the Thematic Investors podcast welcomes Johnny de la Hey, Founder, Hunters Moon Capital, to discuss how the stars are aligning for investors in the European banking system, and how the financial system is driving capital and risk-free returns for shareholders. Johnny, an industry veteran, returns to the financial markets this year, having developed his career at Tiger Management and then managing the well-known Toscafund. 

His big new London launch is Hunters Moon Capital, which we will explore  in terms of strategy and focus, along with the following: 

Connect with Johnny de la Hey

Hunters Moon Capital is a newly launched investment firm founded by industry veterans Johnny de la Hey and Hugh Rance, formerly of Toscafund, with Johnny also having previously worked at Tiger Management. Headquartered in London, the 13-person team is focused on global financials and equity capital markets, drawing on the founders’ successful track records and predecessor strategies.

 The firm officially launched its funds in February 2025, backed by substantial internal capital and supported by a select group of U.S. family offices and institutional investors.

Johnny de la Hey serves as Portfolio Manager of the Crescent Fund, one of the firm’s two flagship strategies. The Crescent Fund is a global long/short equity fund with a focus on financials, particularly across Europe and the UK.

Connect with Kieran Cavanna: 

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