Sand Grove Capital Management

Sand Grove Capital Management

Simon Davies founded Sand Grove in 2011, spinning out from Chris Hohn's TCI Fund Management where he was a partner and senior portfolio manager. The firm emerged with backing from prominent institutional seeders and began trading with a mandate rooted in the belief that merger arbitrage and event-driven investing reward deep legal and regulatory analysis as much as financial modeling. Headquartered in London, Sand Grove operates under the UK's FCA regulatory framework as an LLP structure. Sand Grove's strategy centers on hard-catalyst event-driven situations. The firm trades announced mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and complex corporate reorganizations globally, layering in positions in special situations, distressed credit, and other event-linked opportunities. The portfolio is constructed position by position based on proprietary deal-risk assessment rather than top-down allocations. Confirmed positions have included holding NXP Semiconductors during its protracted Qualcomm acquisition attempt and trading the Glencore-Xstrata merger — both emblematic of the firm's appetite for complex, cross-border transactions where legal risk is mispriced. The firm primarily deploys capital across European and North American markets. Sand Grove manages capital for a range of institutional investors including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and endowments. The firm's headcount and precise assets under management are not publicly disclosed, consistent with its stance as a private investment partnership. The founding partnership with external seeders has since evolved, and the firm is understood to operate with a lean senior investment team centered on Davies. Recent regulatory filings show the firm has maintained positions in European event situations through the first half of 2026. Unlike generalist multi-strategy platforms, Sand Grove's structure as a dedicated event-driven manager creates alignment between its research process and its investor base. The firm does not pursue asset-gathering across unrelated strategies, instead maintaining a mandate focused almost exclusively on announced-deal and hard-catalyst situations — a structural constraint that functions as its primary differentiator in a peer set increasingly dominated by multi-manager platforms.