Lombard Odier’s Natural Capital fund, which launched on Monday, offers investors a chance to invest for the first time in a fund whose sole focus – aside from generating an outsized return on equity – is to profit from the regenerative power of nature.
Created in partnership with the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance (CBA), a pan-European initiative, and with the support of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the fund’s main aims are simple enough.
Nature is an efficient machine, absorbing inputs and emitting outputs in an efficient cycle. Humanity interferes and messes up that elegant mechanism.
The fund raised $400 million in seed capital on its launch. It was dreamed up by the CBA and Christopher Kaminker, who joined Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM), the asset management division of the Swiss wealth and asset manager, in July 2019 as its first head of sustainable investment research and strategy.
Analysts and portfolio managers at LOIM began by identifying 4,000 publicly traded companies. That number was whittled down to 550, which the research team covers in its thematic universe of stocks, which in turn has been refined to what Kaminker describes to a “high-conviction” roster of 40 to 50 firms.
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