Independent Franchise Partners

Hassan Elmasry, the firm's managing partner and co-founder, leads the investment team alongside a small group of partner-level generalists. The firm operates a flat, consensus-driven research process where every team member covers every existing holding. In early 2025, the firm elevated two senior portfolio managers to partner, confirming that decision-making authority had been distributed for some time.

It is an independent asset manager, not a family office. The firm was founded by former Morgan Stanley equity professionals and manages capital exclusively for institutional clients — pension funds, endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds — through a single concentrated pooled vehicle. There is no family capital or single-family wealth backing the operation.

The firm only invests in what it calls 'franchise businesses' — companies with durable competitive advantages that can reinvest capital at high rates of return for decades. It avoids cyclicals, commodity-exposed industrials, banks, and turnaround situations. The team runs a concentrated portfolio of 22–28 names and holds positions for years, treating each purchase as a permanent equity stake rather than a trade.

No. The firm is exclusively a public-equity manager. It has never raised a private-equity fund, made a venture investment, or offered an illiquid-credit vehicle. The strategy is built around the belief that the world's best franchises are already listed and trade at moments of unreasonable pessimism.

The firm systematically avoids banks, insurance companies, commodity producers, deep cyclicals, and any business whose returns on capital are determined primarily by factor prices rather than management execution or brand strength. The team also avoids companies with high financial leverage, as leverage can mask weak franchise quality in benign credit environments.

In January 2025, the firm promoted two long-tenured senior investment professionals to partner, formalizing a succession structure that had been operating for years. The move indicated to existing clients that Elmasry had been sharing portfolio-management authority with a second generation, reducing the key-person risk inherent in any founder-led boutique.

The firm has historically been proactive about capacity, closing its strategy to new investors when asset levels threatened the ability to build or maintain meaningful position sizes in its concentrated portfolio. The single-portfolio structure imposes a natural limit: every new dollar must buy the same 25-or-so securities, so asset growth automatically raises the difficulty of execution for the entire client base.