Peter Mantas And Matthew Castel, General Partners Of Logos LP Talk Small Cap Investing

Today is a very special episode with Peter Mantas and Matthew Castel, General Partners of Logos LP. Both share an array of business and legal experience. Peter’s experience includes senior managerial roles at large information service and enterprise technology companies and he has capital market experience working in alternative investments at McCarthy Tetrault LLP. Matthew’s experience includes working at large enterprise technology companies and international legal firms such as Fasken Martineau LLP. In today’s episode we discuss their approach to investing and their take on mental models.

Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

Peter Mantas and Matthew Castel, General Partners of Logos LP

Transcript

Raul: Good morning, podcast listeners. Today is a very special episode with Peter Mantas and Matthew Castel, general partners of Logos LP. Peter has various business and financial experiences, some of these are senior managerial roles at large information service and enterprise technology companies, to alternative investment and tax groups at McCarthy Tetrault, LLP. He’s a graduate of McGill University with and LLB and a BCL and an honor back Laureate in commerce from University of Ottawa.

Matt has various business and legal experiences as well, some of these are working at international legal firms and the government, to real estate and private equity financing transactions. He’s a graduate of McGill University, with an LLB and BCL. He obtained honors back Laureate in international development and French literature. I want to welcome Peter and Matt to the show. I want to welcome all of our listeners to a very special episode.

Welcome to ValueTalks with Raul.

Yes, I just wanted to welcome all of our listeners to a very special episode. I have Peter Mantas and Matthew Castel; general partners are Logos LP. Peter and Matthew, welcome to the show.

Peter: Thank you for having us.

Matthew: Hello and thank you for having us.

Raul: Yes, if you can just tell me about your guys’ background and what led you to finance and investment?

Peter: Yes, sure. Matthew and I have been decade-long friends. We actually met at McGill. That’s actually where we developed the beta version of the original fund. I had done a significant amount of research on portfolio allocation and optimizing portfolio construction for generating alpha, and the kinds of businesses required to generate a proper portfolio. Matthew had a lot of experience in behavioral economics, sentiment, and international economics. We developed the beta version of the fund actually during our time in law school.

Matthew: It was funny because law school, you always assume that it’s something that is extremely time-consuming. It certainly was, but we actually found that we were actually spending more time on the beta version of our fund, where, actually, going to class. It told us where our passions lie. Right? That was reflected in the returns we started generating early on. We knew that this is something that we needed to devote more time on, and this might be something that was our true-calling, so to speak.

Raul: Yes, there’s no better way to find it than in school, right?

Matthew: Exactly. Then one other thing too I could mention, as well, that I thought might be of interest was that early on, we scratched our heads a lot in terms of finding what name we would call the fund. My business partner here, Peter, he’s Greek, we’re also avid readers about European history and just about civilizations of the past. I had fallen about this word called: Logos. In Greek theology and philosophy, the meaning of that word is the divine reason that connects all things in the universe and gives them meaning. The idea was that we liked that name, it appealed to us because our approach to investing was very interdisciplinary. We looked at this concept of Logos as a nice one to sit on top, to ground us in our approach to investing as an interdisciplinary one.

Raul: Yes, very cool. That was going to be my next question, was how did you guys come up with the name? Very cool. How do you characterize your investment approach and philosophy?

Peter: At the core, we’re a value fund, so we find significant mispricing in the market, we’re particularly focused on mid-cap to small-cap companies. We utilize an interdisciplinary outlook in finding value in high-quality businesses that we’d like to buy and hold for a long time. Typically, we will screen for a number of stocks using our own models. The ones that are the most interesting, we then dive much deeper into them. Given our own unique portfolio construction and portfolio models, we’ll then decide if the names on the watch list are the ones that we would like to have in our portfolio. The amount of percentage thresholds that they should encompass for the overall portfolio. Sometimes we do look at large-caps, like very large-caps and mega-caps, they’re more rare. We will only really evaluate them as peripheral positions typically, it has to have some sort of significant mispricing or something that the market is missing, that we think.