The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relative to wealth advisors and their clients.

J Stern & Co
J Stern & Co, the London-based investment partnership, has made its World Stars Global Equity strategy available to North American investors as a limited partnership fund.  

The launch comes after the firm opened a New York office in March 2023.

The J Stern & Co World Stars Global Equity Fund, LP has been seeded with $325 million by the Stern family and a group of 21 US institutional investors. The underlying strategy, which has more than $1.3 billion in assets under management, invests in a concentrated portfolio of 20 to 30 investments in global companies that have strong and sustainable competitive positions and a long runway of growth.  

The strategy doesn’t follow a benchmark. The LP, which provides daily liquidity, does not adopt short positions or use leverage.

Christopher Rossbach, chief investment officer and portfolio manager, and Katerina Kosmopoulou, deputy portfolio manager, lead a team who manage the fund and its strategy.

In September 2022 J Stern & Co spoke to this publication about its views on emerging market debt and the opportunities in that space.

History
The organization oversees assets for the 200-year-old Stern dynasty. Opening a New York office is in some ways a return to an important part of its history. The Stern banking dynasty traces its origins to a wine merchant family which transformed its business into a bank in 1805 on the counsel of their neighbors, the Rothschild family, who had gone through that transition a few years earlier (coincidentally, the same year that Swiss private bank Pictet was founded). The family flourished, operating throughout Europe. During the Second World War, the French branch of the family represented by J Stern & Co fled to New York in 1940.  

Whilst in New York, Maurice Stern created an investment strategy of long-term value stock picking. In 1946, he returned to Paris to rebuild the banking business in Europe, including an asset management business. After being run for two generations, the firm, called Banque Stern, was sold in 1988 to Swiss Bank Corp (later known as UBS). The family created a family office in Geneva for the Stern family. J Stern & Co is the continuation of that family office, having been brought to London after the global financial crisis. J Stern & Co became a regulated entity in 2012 when it took on third-party clients. Today, it has offices in London, Zurich and Malta.