Ownership,
Not Optics.

Responsible ownership begins with the horizon over which capital is committed. Cadmus Investment Management invests without the fixed life of a fund structure, which means the decision to hold or to sell is settled by the condition of the business rather than by a date agreed with third parties years earlier. That is a structural fact before it is an ethical one, and it is what allows the commitments on this page to describe practice rather than intention.

Holding through volatility is the part of stewardship that is easy to state and difficult to do. A company performing to plan will still, at intervals, be marked down by markets reacting to conditions that have nothing to do with it. An owner obliged to report a quarterly figure experiences that pressure differently from one who is not, and the difference shows up in the decisions each is willing to make.

The obligation runs in the other direction as well. Patience is not a synonym for inattention, and a long horizon is no reason to leave a deteriorating position unexamined. We distinguish between a thesis that is taking longer than expected and one that has stopped being true: the first deserves support, the second deserves a decision.

The firm is domiciled in London and holds itself to British standards of governance and disclosure. Those standards are most demanding precisely where it matters to the people whose capital is at stake — in the documentation of decisions, the separation of responsibilities, and the handling of confidential information.

Transparency with counterparties is treated as a condition of doing business rather than a courtesy extended when convenient. We would rather lose a transaction than secure one on a basis we could not describe plainly afterwards, and we regard a counterparty's willingness to be equally direct as a material piece of diligence in its own right.

The same standard applies to the companies the firm backs. Governance rights, information undertakings, and the terms on which capital may be added or withdrawn are settled at structuring, while goodwill is high and interests coincide. We ask of our portfolio companies what we ask of ourselves, and we accept that this occasionally makes us a more demanding shareholder than others would be.

Through its partners the firm engages with the energy transition, healthcare, mobility, and technology built to serve genuine needs. Allocation favours companies constructing the infrastructure of a more resilient economy over those principally engaged in describing one.

We are deliberately careful with the language here. The word sustainable has been applied to a great many things it does not fit, and a label attached at the portfolio level says little about what any individual holding actually does. We prefer to judge a company by what it makes, whom it serves, and whether demand for it would survive the withdrawal of a subsidy.

This is also where the partner network earns its place. An operator inside an energy or mobility supply chain can distinguish a technology that works at demonstration scale from one that works at industrial scale — a distinction financial analysis alone is poorly equipped to make, and one that separates a durable business from a well-funded intention.

Responsibility begins with understanding the downside. Before capital is committed the loss case is quantified and written down, and the firm satisfies itself that the loss is one it is prepared to accept in full — not one it merely expects to avoid. A risk that has not been named has not been managed.

Position sizing is where that understanding becomes discipline. We size so that no single outcome can determine the health of the portfolio, and we treat the preservation of capital as the first condition of return rather than a constraint upon it. Conviction expressed too cautiously carries the risk of a decision without the return; conviction expressed without limit is not conviction but exposure.

The final test is one of accountability. We avoid exposure we could not justify to those whose capital we manage, in terms they would recognise and at a moment when the position had moved against us. It is a deliberately conservative standard, and it declines more opportunities than it accepts.