Night Owl Capital Management

Gaurav Kapadia, the firm's founder, serves as the sole portfolio manager. He launched Night Owl in 2019 after a decade at Soroban Capital Partners and six years in Goldman Sachs's Principal Strategies group. All investment decisions run through Kapadia; the firm reports fewer than five investment professionals, and no co-portfolio manager or investment committee structure has been disclosed in its public filings.

The firm targets a holding period of 10 years or more and generates ideas through proprietary fundamental research on a narrow universe of high-return, cash-generative businesses. Kapadia has stated in quarterly letters that the strategy is deliberately index-agnostic and will only deploy into companies that meet its return-on-capital and moat-width thresholds. When no such companies are priced attractively, the firm allows cash to accumulate rather than adding lower-conviction names.

Night Owl runs a single strategy: long-only, concentrated public equities. It does not allocate to private markets, credit, macro, or any alternative asset class. The firm's SEC filings consistently describe the strategy as exclusively equity-focused, and it has not launched any private-investment vehicles or credit funds.

The firm targets companies with durable economic moats and high free-cash-flow generation, which has historically led it to information services, payments networks, and data-centric technology businesses. Public 13F disclosures have shown positions in MSCI, Moody's, and Mastercard. Kapadia has publicly noted that the strategy avoids capital-intensive industrials, commodity businesses, and companies that lack pricing power, though the firm does not publish a formal restricted-sector list.

The firm is structured as a Delaware-registered limited liability company and a registered investment adviser. Kapadia launched the firm with what was described in early ADV filings as predominantly founder and family capital. In September 2024, an amended SEC ADV disclosed the addition of a qualified outside investor as a limited partner. The firm has not publicly disclosed the names of any external limited partners beyond what is legally required in its ADV.

Night Owl has a stated willingness to hold more than 20% of the portfolio in cash during periods when no investment meets its 10-year return hurdle. This is articulated in quarterly communications as a structural discipline tied to the firm's long-duration mandate, not a tactical macro hedge. Few registered investment advisers in the concentrated-equity space formally commit to that level of cash tolerance, making it a distinctive feature of Kapadia's operating model.

The combination of an explicit 10-year minimum holding period and a benchmark-agnostic, 8-to-12-name book creates a strategy that structurally ignores quarterly relative-return risk. Kapadia's willingness to let cash climb above 20% — and his track record at Soroban, where he co-managed a concentrated, long-duration equity book — provide a verifiable pedigree for the approach. The firm also runs with a single decision-maker, which reduces committee-driven drift but heightens key-person risk relative to team-based peers.