Growth & innovation

NZS Capital, Jupiter’s strategic investment partner, manages strategies that seek innovative, long-duration growth companies that maximize non-zero-sum outcomes for customers, employees, society, and the environment.

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Strategies

NZS Growth Equity Strategy	Innovation & Disruption. Seeks to own 50-70 innovative businesses with long-duration growth potential whose business operations, products and services contribute more value than they take for all stakeholders (non-zero sum).
NZS Select Equity Strategy	Focused innovation & disruption. Seeks to own 20-30 innovative businesses with long-duration growth potential and whose business operations, products and services contribute more value than they take for all stakeholders (non-zero sum).
NZS Technology Strategy	Technology as the solution. Seeks to own 50-70 innovative technology companies with long-duration growth potential and whose business operations, products and services contribute more value than they take for all stakeholders (non-zero sum).

Insights

Resilience & Optionality

Learn more about “complexity investing” from NZS Capital.

NZS Capital’s Innovative Approach

Brinton Johns discusses the investment philosophy behind its growth strategies.

SITAL Week – NZS Capital’s weekly newsletter

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Shunning predictions to focus on sustainable trends

The team at NZS Capital explain why they don’t make macro forecasts or try to predict when market focus will shift, but instead look for sustainable investable trends.

Sign up for SITAL week – NZS Capital’s weekly newsletter

About NZS Capital

Who we are

We are a firm dedicated to investing in adaptive and growing businesses that create more value than they take (non-zero sum). Our portfolios harness resilience and optionality, traits necessary to successfully navigate long-term disruptive forces to the global economy.

Founded by Brad Slingerlend and Brinton Johns, each with more than 20 years investing experience, NZS Capital holds portfolio companies to a higher standard than traditional ESG. We call it non-zero sum and it simply means that we seek companies that can provide win-win benefits to all its stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, the planet and society, and investors.

How we see the world

We take our investing cues from biology. We can learn more about a company by studying ants and bees than business and economics. Successful businesses, like biological systems, are complex systems that must constantly adapt to disruptive forces or face extinction. We are still in the early phase of a multi-decade shift from analog to digital—a transformation that will, with increasing pace, disrupt every sector, industry and business.

A new paradigm for asset management

For a business to adapt and thrive in a complex system, we consider three primary factors: Quality, Growth and Context.

Quality

Management teams are the critical ingredient. Successful teams apply long-term, adaptive thinking to their business. They intuitively understand the ever-evolving needs of its customers and constantly innovate to stay ahead of the curve and avoid disruption.

Growth

In a complex world with increasing interdependencies, a company that operates a platform focused on creating value for all participants, including itself, has the potential to disrupt established markets. Non-zero sum, the optimal win-win situation, is achieved when the platform creates more value for the ecosystem than it does for the company’s own treasury. Companies disrupting large established markets can do so by offering all constituents higher non-zero sum than the incumbents.

Context

Most of the research conducted by the NZS team seeks to comprehend the entire ecosystem in which a company operates. Traditional analyses intersect with a holistic understanding of what may or may not change and how it could impact a company’s growth trajectory. Portfolios are constructed with resilience and optionality in mind, carefully reducing a portfolio company’s fragility to a particular view of the future.

Portfolio Construction – Concentrating Resilience and Distributing Optionality

The global economy and its constituent companies are a complex, adaptive system. We cannot predict the future with a comfortable degree of certainty.

NZS manages this risk by concentrating resilience and distributing optionality. Our portfolios hold fewer, larger positions in companies that are highly adaptive in the face of disruption. These resilient companies are generally stable, long-term investments whose success is defined by broad predictions and a narrower range of outcomes. At the other end are numerous, smaller positions in companies with high investment asymmetry, but a wider range of potential outcomes. These companies offer optionality for multiple paths to success.

NZS Capital LLC and Jupiter Asset Management formed a strategic partnership early in 2020. Visit NZSCapital.com to learn more about NZS Capital.

Meet the team

The NZS Capital team

NZS Capital was co-founded by fund managers Brad Slingerlend and Brinton Johns who worked together for 14 years at Janus Capital prior to setting up on their own. They both have long and successful track records of managing global equities portfolios on behalf of institutional and retail investors.

NZS Capital also consists of investors Jon Bathgate and Joe Furmanski, who each have over 10 years investment experience. NZS Capital’s President and Chief Risk Officer is Adam Schor, who has almost 30 years of industry experience.