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New Managers
November 2016
PROFILES: Left Brain Capital Management, Carmot CapitalFor this long-biased hedge fund manager, flexibility is key
A former Merrill Lynch banker launched a long-biased hedge fund earlier this year, which has so far outperformed in great part thanks to its philosophy of flexibility. Noland Langford started his career at Merrill Lynch in the late 90s as a financial advisor, and went on to work at Wells Fargo in 2005 as first vice president - investment officer. He left the Big Firm environment in 2014 to run his own wealth management business, Left Brain Wealth Management, in Naperville, Illinois. As his separately managed accounts were doing well, he decided to launch an eponymous investment management entity, Left Brain Capital Management, and a long-biased hedge fund focused on growth. The managed account structure was limiting in that the managers could not use the whole of its strategy, he explained. "So we wanted to take it to a new level and see what it could do for investors when it was unencumbered." The Left Brain Capital Appreciation Fund L.P.'s mission is to quintuple investors' money in the space of ten years. Launched in January 2016, it is up 101% YTD (to end-September) - compared to the S&P500's 4.2% and the Russell 2000's 4.4% (the Barclay Equity Long Bias Index is up 2.2% YTD to end-October). The fund achieved this return through a bottom-up approach, by focusing on factors and placing opportunistic capital in high-yield bonds. "We look at potential investments first from a fundamental perspective, then we look at the technicals, and finally we look at different quantitative factors, namely around earnings," Langford told Opalesque. "And if a business meets all three criteria, we will go and look at the company's capital structure and decide whether we get exposure in stocks, bonds, preferreds or options." "One of the things that was very obvious at th...................... To view our full article please login
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