Interview #101 : Jean Philippe Tissot (Arauca Capital)
Holding great businesses for long periods of time
For this issue we have the pleasure of interviewing Jean Philippe Tissot from Arauca Capital.
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Hi Jean, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview.
Can you tell us about your background, and what inspired you to pursue a career in investing?
Thank you, Jon, for inviting me. It is a pleasure. I was born in Colombia in the 80s, which, along with the 90s, were very violent decades in my country. On one hand, we had the country dominated by drug dealers, and then by terrorist guerrillas.
My family on my mother’s side owned large farms in the country, and I witnessed firsthand how many wealthy people lost all their capital, by bad luck but mostly by bad decisions.
I experienced firsthand invasions of our land, where for years we could not enter our property. My uncle was kidnapped, just to mention a few shocking experiences.
Despite that, we managed to preserve wealth by keeping the farm. That was a huge lesson and created a fire in me to preserve and grow capital. I saw many families losing it all.
Eventually, almost all my generation emigrated and there was not anyone who could take care of the farm. We decided to sell it and that was when I was responsible to manage a portion of the value of the farm, which was or actually still is called “Hacienda Arauca”.
As I was working in the financial sector in London, some family members asked me to help them as well, and that was the origin of the family partnership, which eventually became Arauca Capital (the Fund).
And to tie the previous experience to my working experience, I started my career as an FX trader in Colombia. I then moved to Germany, where I worked for adidas and was responsible for setting up and managing the Latin American FX hedging strategy.
Eventually, I became responsible for the global FX exposure. I then moved to London, where I worked at J.P. Morgan and BNP Paribas in FX derivatives.
During my time in banking, we sold the farm, and the lesson from that experience made me seek a successful investing philosophy where I could think long-term and base my decisions on the assets, not the market. That’s when I discovered the lessons of Buffett, which, as you can imagine, is a whole rabbit hole.
Can you provide readers with a brief overview of Arauca Capital - who do you manage funds on behalf of? And what type of business do you like to invest in?
Arauca Capital's objective is to find and invest in outstanding companies, with sustainable business models and growth attributes led by great management teams, Arauca´s aim is to invest for long periods of time, provided constant execution by the management teams.
Our core lies in finding companies with unrecognized earnings, this in other words can also be defined as free optionality. Arauca Capital is market cap and industry agnostic.