What is ROSE OAK

ROSE OAK Investments & Co (“ROSE OAK”) is a licensed investment advisory and management firm focused on helping its clients create wealth through professional investing.

ROSE OAK was formed in November 2003 by Nigel J Lewis in order to facilitate a management buy-out (MBO) in early 2004 of the investment management and advisory business he established in January 1998 during his time with a leading Australian private investment bank.

Positioned only to be an investment advisory and management firm, the ROSE OAK platform has the boutique discipline, work-passion culture, and cost-base associated with a single focused, owner-operated professional investor practice.

Most importantly, ROSE OAK has none of the potential conflicts associated with career risks of in-house employees, affiliated or commission-based advice, or volume-of-funds-under-advice business models.

Structured as a small scale, wholesale, financial services business, ROSE OAK holds its own Australian Financial Services Licence AFSL No. 255291.

ROSE OAK is wholly independent and only provides confidential and transparent advice and management through agreements directly with its clients.

ROSE OAK’s corporate mission is to professionally manage, advise and assist its clients manage their investments whilst;

Continually creating a collegial culture of independent learning, risk-taking and decision making.

Providing a professional platform for our crew and clients to educate, debate and decide on portfolios.

Transparently aligning our interests with our clients’ interests.

Remaining focussed on cashflows – for our portfolios, our people and our profession.

WHY ROSE OAK

Successful investing is about blending the art of investment research with the science of financial management.

It’s about combining corporate finance with behavioural finance.

It’s about identifying and understanding qualitative and quantitative factors that drive a company’s value and importantly drive the financial security prices.

It’s about combining forecasts with facts; the empirical versus the sensational, expectations not just probabilities.

Successful investing is about weighing those expectations with evidence. The passionate views of the future against the harsh reality of the present, and being fully aware of the rhyming of the past (cycles).

Time and patience are critical for successful investing.

This requires strength and discipline to sometimes, often, stand outside the crowd.

Simple passion combined with dispassionate analysis is invaluable when employed well.

We at ROSE OAK are simply passionate about investing;
we live it, we breathe it, and it’s all we do.

The simplicity and passion of a ROSE…

…united with the strength and patience of OAK

ROSE OAK Investments & Co

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Absolute wealth philosophy

We subscribe to an asymmetric risk & absolute return investment philosophy which stresses the importance of the protection of capital as well as the creation of wealth.

We understand that in order to compound capital over the medium to long term, it is the dollar consequences of risks that matters; not percentage relativities.

Our process explicitly acknowledges that significant portfolio capital losses destroy the rate at which capital can compound.

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Independent ownership

ROSE OAK is wholly owned by its principals.

This ensures the focus remains on our first priority – which is the quality of our service to our clients.

This ownership structure encircles the independence, confidentiality and transparency characteristics we offer our clients.

As investment counsellors we operate robust and time-tested business and compliance infrastructure, systems and protocols, which ensures that operational risks are well managed and actively minimised.

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26th year of track record

We are in our 26th successful year of the investing marathon, following the same investment philosophy, the same active process and undertaken by the same (what some call) ‘key-man-risk’.

Established in 1998, bought in early 2004 via a management buy-out, we ourselves are long-term investors without any corporate or short-term conflicts or pressures.

Our financial and reputation risks are directly aligned with our advice, management and service we offer our clients.

Compounding Capital Matters …

Our Investment Philosophy

Our responsibility is to assist clients allocate capital to preserve and create wealth.

We take a holistic approach to investing. Every investment vehicle used in the execution of strategies are subject to the overall total portfolio risk profile, liquidity needs, and investing horizon objectives of each individual client.
We spend regular time with each client learning, understanding and continually calibrating with them their personal risk profiles to investments at differing points in the financial and economic cycles.

We think of ourselves as a co-pilot with each client in their own investing journey. Assisting to aviate, navigate and communicate both the 30,000-foot macro-outlook and the 3-foot instruments panel (individual investments).

Aligned and seated alongside clients, yet wholly independent, our role is not cramped by commissions, the value of funds-under-fees or career-risk embedded in short-term institutional performance surveys or employee wages/bonuses.

With transparent flexibility that sometimes means advising clients to preserve wealth by temporarily holding residual levels of cash, bill and bond instruments. This active rather than responsive approach to capital protection is, and has proven to be, a critical risk management tool over our professional investing history and very effective in the protection of compounded capital throughout cycles.

Our differentiation is the asymmetric focus on risks and absolute returns throughout a cycle. Our investing DNA is within our name (ROIC).

Our priority is to preserve capital at the portfolio level. Ignoring market index structures and index benchmarking distractions we first focus on the risk of losing money at differing points throughout the investing cycle.

Our clients are typically loss averse – where the penalty from a dollar lost is greater than the profit from a dollar gained.

Our style is long-term and fundamental. We advise on concentrated, clearly understood, and transparent investments within portfolios.
We spend considerable time filtering investment opportunities ensuring we don’t get caught-up in market ‘noise’ that can destroy portfolio wealth. Holding the good, the bad AND the ugly is not successful diversification.

Our discipline critically includes patience. However, we have strong execution signals. A change in an investments key issue will see us immediately take action to assist preserve and protect portfolios.  As an investing co-pilot, warning lights flashing on an instrument panel are only useful if action is timely assessed and actively taken.

Our portfolio approach is generally concentrated by the number of securities but diversified by risk characteristics.

Our risk management motivation is to minimize downside outcomes and capture upside volatility at a price. Unlike salesmen who focus on selling stories and returns, we believe that as stewards of capital our aim is to actively manage risk. RISK MANAGEMENT is the process, RETURNS are the outcome.

Our alignment of interests is directly correlated with our clients’ interests. That is, absolute dollars of wealth, not short-term percentage movements.

Our core philosophy in all our activities is that investing is about making decisions about the future with a level of uncertainty today.

Our independence doesn’t mean we operate in a vacuum… but rather that we have great freedom from the influences of others.
We are strongly of the view that making point forecasts is futile. Rather we prefer to think in multiple scenario terms drawn from the breadth of the investor crowd…
We never confuse companies with share prices…

Key Investment Manager

Our key investment manager / advisor has been following the same asymmetric risk and absolute return investment philosophy, disciplined financial and behavioural process since the establishment of the practice in 1998, and reinforced through financial and reputation risks via the management buy-out in 2004.

Now, in 2024, we are in our 26th year – of consistent and successful investing – into the investing marathon…

ROSE OAK is proud to support throughout this website some of the simple yet powerful sketches of Carl Richards of Behavior Gap. We admire like-minded professionals who recognise that simplicity can cut through the copious chaos that surrounds financial management and advice globally. The sketches throughout this website are used under Creative Commons License and Carl’s commentaries can be found at www.behaviorgap.com

ROSE OAK Investments & Co Pty Limited

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AFSL NO. 255291
Please note:
ROSE OAK only deals with wholesale clients (non-retail clients) as defined in the Corporations Act 2001.