Boutique investment firm, London
Patient capital for enduring businesses.
Northwind owns eleven businesses and holds them for years. We do the homework, buy at a sensible price, then leave good management alone to get on with it.
- Founded
- 2009
- Assets under management
- £420m
- Companies held
- 11
- Avg. holding period
- 8.5 yrs
Approach
A quiet strategy,
held with conviction.
Three principles have run every decision since 2009. They are deliberately unfashionable. They have not changed.
- 01
Concentration over diversification
We hold eleven businesses, not a hundred. When you only own what you understand deeply, you can afford to wait. You can also act fast when it counts.
- 02
Time as the advantage
Our average holding period is over eight years. We are not bothered by quarters. The compounding we care about happens on a horizon most of the market stopped watching years ago.
- 03
Aligned, not adversarial
We keep our own money in the same holdings our partners own, and we back managers we would happily work for. Alignment is the strategy, not a line in the pitch deck.
Track record
Measured in decades, not quarters.
- £420m
- Under management
- in a single, concentrated strategy
- Since 2009
- One strategy, unchanged
- no style drift, no chasing the cycle
- 0
- Permanent capital losses
- on core holdings to date
- 96%
- Partner capital retained
- through the 2020 drawdown
We don't headline a return figure here. Verified performance, with full risk disclosure, is shared with partners in our quarterly reporting.
Capital at risk. The value of investments can go down as well as up, and past performance is not a guide to future results.
Team
Small by design.
Four partners, one strategy. You talk to the people making the decisions. There is no layer in between.
-
Eleanor Vance
Managing PartnerCFA · 28 years in markets
Founded Northwind in 2009, after fourteen years allocating capital inside a large institution. She thinks the best returns come from doing very little, very patiently. She writes most of the firm's letters to partners.
-
Marcus Idowu
Partner, InvestmentsFormer operator · 17 years
Leads the diligence on operating businesses. He ran a family manufacturing group before he started taking them apart for a living, so he spends more time on factory floors than in front of a screen.
-
Sofia Reinholt
Partner, ResearchCFA · 14 years in research
Runs the research desk. Twelve years covering industrials and consumer staples before Northwind. Her rule is simple. If a thesis won't fit clearly on one page, she doesn't trust it.
-
James Okonkwo
Head of Investor Relations16 years in client service
Looks after the firm's limited partners. He turns a deliberately quiet strategy into plain, unhurried updates, and keeps the noise off the rest of the team so they can think.
Meet the team and read the firm's story on our history page.
Insights & letters
We write more than we trade.
- Letters · April 2026 On doing nothing, profitably Why our busiest quarters are often the ones with no transactions at all.
- Markets · January 2026 The cost of a crowded trade Why we keep walking away from the year's most obvious ideas.
- Companies · October 2025 Operators, not spreadsheets How time spent on factory floors changes the questions we ask.
Portfolio
What we own.
Eleven businesses across four areas we know well. We buy durable, cash-generative companies, then we get out of their way.
- 01
Specialist manufacturing
Companies that make a part the wider world depends on and never thinks about. Customers stay for decades because changing supplier is more trouble than it is worth.
- 02
Essential B2B services
Dull, repeat-billing work a customer cannot run without. The invoice gets paid in the good years and the bad ones.
- 03
Healthcare & diagnostics
Regulated companies serving demand we can predict ten years out. They have to prove what they sell, which keeps the pretenders out.
- 04
Niche consumer brands
Category leaders with real pricing power, whose customers would genuinely miss them if they were gone.
A full schedule of holdings is shared with partners in our quarterly reporting. Get in touch to request it.
Contact
For prospective partners.
We work with a deliberately small group of long-term investors. If your horizon matches ours, we'd be glad to talk.
- Office
- 12 Austin Friars, London EC2N 2HE