A Casa de Investimentos
Message from the CEO
Over the last three years we welcomed over five thousand new Clients to Casa de Investimentos. Many of them don’t know us personally. We decided to write an Owner’s Manual, to make clear to all our current and future Clients, the investment principles which help guide our decisions. Many have heard us discuss these before, but we would rather have a few bored Clients than half a dozen with the wrong idea about what we do.
The inspiration to open Casa de Investimentos, came after I was gifted a special book in 2004 while I was still working in London. The book, Buffettology, written by Mary Buffett and David Clark, shaped our investment philosophy, gave us the conviction to invest in equities and the importance of having a long-term horizon.
We decided to build an investment firm where we would be proud to be a Client. Owning the business gives us the freedom to do the right thing: invest our Client’s money how we would like our own to be invested. To do so, our business model could not have any conflicts of interest so that we could always make decisions with our Client’s best interests in mind. Over the long run, this is also our best interest.
Casa de Investimentos opened its doors on 15 November 2010. We never looked for shortcuts or the easy road. We always knew that growing an investment business in Portugal wouldn’t be easy. Portuguese investors are scarred from their experiences during the sovereign debt crisis which led to the bankruptcy of several Portuguese banks. Our greatest challenge was to overcome the generalized idea that investing in equities is a game of luck and a speculative activity. We never lost sight of our North Star. Unlike what the Cheshire cat told Alice: “if you don’t know where you are going, the road you take doesn’t matter,” we know where we are going and the road we wish to take.
During the past thirty years a significant part of my work involved teaching financial executives at some of the world’s leading financial institutions. From the very beginning I believed that a key part of our job at Casa de Investimentos would be to share investment knowledge in a clear, simple, and intuitive manner. Teaching and increasing financial literacy are a core part of our DNA, and the legacy we want to build: study, invest and teach.
Our purpose is to protect and build our Clients, and their family’s financial wealth. We seek to do so with transparency and limited risk, underpinned by a culture of continuous improvement where we learn from our mistakes. Our culture shapes every decision we make and the service we provide our Clients.
“We want to make it clear that our job isn’t to predict what will happen in financial markets or to the share prices of the company’s we invest in.”
We can’t promise a fixed or guaranteed return. What we can promise is that:
- We select our companies based on their value and not their popularity,
- We seek to minimize the risk of a permanent loss of capital by investing in high quality businesses which we purchase with a margin of safety,
- A large part of my family’s wealth is invested in the same businesses that our Clients are invested in.
Casa de Investimentos is not a conventional financial institution and will never be one. We work so that our Clients will stay with us for decades, and hopefully bring their children and grandchildren along too.
Emília Vieira