Robert Vinall
RV Capital Founder

People

Robert Vinall

I am the founder and sole employee of RV Capital. RV Capital is a one captain ship as I believe that capital is allocated best by a single individual with full responsibility and accountability rather than by committee.  This is not to say that I make investment decisions in complete isolation. I have a wide network of like-minded investors and business managers with whom I regularly spar and exchange ideas.

My background as an investor goes back to 1997 when I joined Goldman Sachs Asset Management, London. Actually my background goes further back when I invested as a child in the first privatisations in the UK and, having caught the investment bug, followed my grandfather as he managed his portfolio, but I was not a value investor then.

After leaving Goldman Sachs in 1998, I was Head of Telecommunications Research at DZ Bank, Frankfurt. Here, I acquired specialised knowledge in a single sector and a small number of companies. In 2004 I joined CDL Principal Investors in Zurich. CDL is a boutique advisory business, where I sourced and analysed activist investment opportunities in public markets on behalf of a handful of clients including one of Switzerland’s best known investors. At CDL, I was a generalist and analysed companies in many different sectors. Despite this, my work was no less detailed than as a sector specialist as I only looked at one company at a time and spent months on the research if necessary. As a generalist, I had the enormous advantage of being able to compare and contrast a company in one sector with companies in other industries. I am convinced that one can only understand one industry properly by knowing other industries, as only then do the most salient features become apparent. As such, I am a fully paid up generalist, but only in the context of an investment approach which is concentrated and has a very low turnover.

I founded RV Capital in 2006 in order to follow my own particular brand of investing. In particular, I wanted to put into practice one of the key insights from my period as an activist investor: that if under-owned companies are poorly run, then companies with great owners must be better run. Furthermore, companies with stable and long term shareholders often trade at a discount to companies with open shareholder structures as they lack a certain “excitement factor”.

When I set up RV Capital, it was always my ambition to manage my own funds, but in the early years I did not have access to capital, and so I advised family offices, public and private companies and hedge funds on their capital allocation decisions. In hindsight, this was an excellent apprenticeship as I was exposed to different investing techniques and perspectives including that of the corporation. I consider the latter to be particularly valuable as few investors get to view the inner machinations of companies and the very different way that capital is allocated.

In 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis, I was able to fulfill a long held ambition of starting a fund called “Business Owner ” with the support of the Rentrop family office. This was followed by a segregated account which I started for a large German foundation in 2009.

I am based in Kilchberg, which is near Zurich, Switzerland and have lived here since 2004 with my wife and two children.