“After more than 20 years in finance, from the LSE to Salomon Brothers to LTCM, you’d have thought that I’d have figured out how to invest my family’s savings. Well, it was 2002, I just turned 40, and I hadn’t.”

I was at the start of a long sabbatical, with time to think. I devoted the next five years to figuring this out, and eventually I came to define an approach that worked for me. I co-authored a research paper and gave a TEDx talk describing it. It embraces diversification, a long horizon perspective, and tax and cost efficiency. It recognizes the limitations of pure market cap weighting, and uses value and momentum to try to navigate the bubbles and busts that occasionally blow through, often driven by investors’ return chasing behavior. And it says ‘no thank you’ to complexity, leverage, shorting and high fees. As I started to move my family’s savings into this investment approach a dozen close friends told me they wanted to go that way too. This gave birth to Elm at the end of 2011.

– Victor Haghani, Founder