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By Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London:

There is a young portfolio manager who runs a small hedge fund in London, who wants it to stay small, focused and agile in order to take advantage of opportunities overlooked by its larger peers, who does not want institutional money, who believes in trust, who predicts the economy is far from recovered - and who sees the financial industry as full of spendthrifts.

Pedro Noronha, when European Special Situations portfolio manager at JP Morgan’s Proprietary Positioning Business in London, decided to go it alone at the end of 2007 (the unit closed down last year).

“We did quite well (at JPMorgan), but then everybody did well before 2007. Even a monk would have made money in those years.” Prior to JP Morgan, he had spent some years at Merrill Lynch, and what he wanted now was to be on the buy-side of the business. The credit crunch had already started, but had not yet shown its true colours.

An ordinary story, you might say. Indeed, but the more ordinary scenario would have seen a fresh-faced ex-banker setting up a hedge fund, and then getting gobbled up by the 2008 credit crunch. However Noronha, originally from Portugal, surfed the waves and landed safely. True, the beginnings of his Global Value Fund, launched in March-08, were rocky. It ended the year at -6%. But it now stands at +18% YTD (to end-May).

The creation of Noster Capital (‘noster’ means ‘our’ in Latin) was motivated by Noronha’s view at ......................

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