Bayard Capital

Bayard Capital

Andreas Thommen launched Bayard Capital AG in Zurich in 2004 as a specialized investment manager running a single strategy: a concentrated portfolio of short equity positions in European companies the firm believes are overvalued or fundamentally flawed. The firm is not a family office but an independent asset manager structured around a single flagship fund, the Bayard Capital Fund, which publicly discloses its top holdings to investors. Thommen, a Swiss national, built the firm around forensic financial analysis, targeting companies where he alleges accounting irregularities, unsustainable business models, or corporate governance failures that the market has not yet priced in. The firm's investment strategy is entirely focused on fundamental short-selling, with the fund typically holding only 5 to 15 positions at any given time. Bayard does not operate as a long-short equity hedge fund; its mandate is unhedged short exposure, meaning it generates returns when target companies decline in value. The fund takes positions predominantly in mid- and large-cap European equities, with occasional exposure to North American names. High-profile past targets have included the German payments company Wirecard AG — a position Thommen initiated well before the company's 2020 collapse (per the firm's public investor letters, 2008-2020) — as well as the Swiss-listed weather services company Meteoblue Holding AG. The fund operates with an indefinite holding period and is prepared to hold positions through years of corporate denial and legal pushback. Bayard Capital maintains a deliberately lean structure consistent with its concentrated mandate. The team operates from a single Zurich office, with Thommen serving as CIO and the primary decision-maker on portfolio construction. The firm does not operate adjacent vehicles, family office structures, or private foundations, and it does not participate in venture capital, private equity, or long-only strategies. In recent years, Thommen has publicly targeted Swiss industrials and European green-energy firms, releasing detailed critical research that functions as both an investment thesis and a catalyst for the position. Bayard's structure differs from most short-selling funds because it openly publishes its top holdings and detailed investment theses, operating with a transparency typically associated with activist investors rather than hedge funds that guard their short books. This public-facing posture — releasing multi-page reports alleging fraud or misrepresentation — makes the firm a regular subject of European financial media and occasional legal disputes with the companies it targets. The single-fund, single-strategy architecture also means the firm's survival depends entirely on a strategy that has structurally asymmetric risk: potential gains are capped at 100%, while losses can theoretically be unlimited.