Old Bridge Capital Management

Kenneth Andrade, the founder and chief investment officer, makes all final investment decisions. He was previously the head of investments at IDFC Mutual Fund, where he managed some of India's best-performing small- and mid-cap funds over a 20-year career. The research team is intentionally small, with co-founder Tarakki Kothari and a handful of analysts feeding ideas into Andrade's single-decision-maker framework. The firm has publicly stated it will not add layers of portfolio managers or investment committees.

Andrade relies on primary, on-the-ground research rather than sell-side coverage. The team conducts factory visits, supply-chain interviews, and management meetings that can stretch over multiple quarters before a position is initiated. Because the firm avoids the quarterly reporting pressure of mutual funds, it can hold positions through multi-year capex cycles without worrying about short-term underperformance. The firm's white papers — including a widely circulated 2022 piece on Indian specialty-chemical export momentum — are a public window into its sourcing thesis.

No. Old Bridge is exclusively a public-equities manager deploying through the Indian PMS regulatory structure. The firm invests only in listed Indian companies. Andrade has consistently stated in investor letters and media interviews that he has no interest in private markets, believing that Indian public markets offer sufficient inefficiency and breadth for the concentrated strategy he runs.

Andrade has structured the firm so that a significant portion of his compensation is performance-linked rather than a flat percentage of assets. While exact fee terms are private between the firm and its accredited limited partners, public commentary from Andrade indicates he charges a lower-than-median management fee in exchange for a performance fee on returns above a hurdle rate. This aligns the firm with allocators who want the manager eating his own cooking rather than collecting a steady AUM fee.

The firm does not dilute concentration through diversification — it defines risk as permanent capital loss on a single company, not benchmark-relative tracking error. The flagship PMS holds 15 to 25 names, with the top five often exceeding 40 percent of assets. Andrade has publicly argued that concentration is a feature, not a bug, because it forces deeper due diligence. The risk control is the research process itself and a willingness to exit immediately if the original thesis breaks, regardless of price.

As of early 2024, Andrade publicly signaled that the flagship strategy was nearing its capacity ceiling and would stop accepting new commitments within the fiscal year. The typical limited partner is an Indian family office, an entrepreneur who has sold a business, or a high-net-worth individual with an existing relationship to Andrade. The firm does not distribute through banking wealth-management platforms, and the book has stayed deliberately small — industry estimates place it at a few hundred crore rupees.

Andrade has publicly stated he avoids highly regulated Indian sectors — public-sector banks, state-owned energy companies, and telecoms burdened by government spectrum obligations. He also stays away from real-estate developers that depend on leverage and political approvals. The firm prefers capital-light manufacturing, specialty chemicals, and enterprise-software exporters where management quality and competitive moat, rather than government policy, determine returns.