Home / Equities / Craft, curiosity and capital: Inside the Cooper Investors Endeavour Fund

It’s easy to forget, when listening to Marcus Guzzardi and Geoff Di Felice speak about investing, that their job is fundamentally about numbers. Not because they ignore the maths – on the contrary, both men are steeped in detail – but because the way they describe their work sounds more like anthropology than asset management.

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For Geoffrey di Felice and Marcus Guzzardi, investment is all about observing people, building trust, and understanding the psychology of risk. The Cooper Investors Endeavour Fund, their shared portfolio of global listed smaller companies, is as much a study in human behaviour as it is in business fundamentals.

Guzzardi came to investing through a forensic, even combative route; trained in a research house that assumed management was lying unless proven otherwise. His early career revolved around cash conversion, earnings quality, and a healthy dose of cynicism. But Cooper Investors reshaped that lens. “What I found here was a place that respected great leadership,” he says. The pivot from suspicion to admiration – particularly for family-run businesses and long-term thinking – now defines his style.

Di Felice, by contrast, took his cues from private markets and global pension funds, having cut his teeth during the GFC. He talks about investing with the calm of someone who’s seen chaos up close. “Our founder back then made a very bold statement at the time. He said, ‘we’re going to turn the ship into the storm’ – and we did.” That experience taught him how conviction can thrive in dislocation, a lesson that now underpins his and Guzzardi’s appetite for investing through downturns, not in spite of them.

Their fund holds a maximum of 15 investments. That’s it. No more, ever. “If we find a great opportunity, it has to displace something already in the portfolio,” says Di Felice. That scarcity of space forces clarity. It raises the hurdle rate for new ideas and ensures they deploy capital only when all the stars align – business quality, leadership, valuation, and timing. “We might get two or three great opportunities a year,” Guzzardi adds. “The rest we pass on.”

Process is everything. Every investment begins with a detailed operational checklist – targets around product rollouts, capacity expansions, acquisitions. “We’re not looking at whether they beat consensus,” says Guzzardi. “We’re looking at whether they did what they told us they would do.” This approach, drawn more from private equity than public markets, helps them tune out short-term noise and lean on their own conviction when volatility inevitably hits.

The Endeavour Fund is structured to resist the temptations of the modern market – constant trading, performance-chasing, short-termism. “Most of our day is spent when the markets we invest in aren’t even open,” Di Felice explains. That time is used not for staring at screens but for research, writing, travel, and relationship-building. They meet founders on factory floors, not conference panels. They measure service times in restaurants. They track the slow progress of product distribution through trade channels. This is not remote-control investing.

Both managers are also deeply committed to understanding the people behind the businesses they back. “A really fertile line of questioning,” Di Felice says, “is to ask people about the personal crises they’ve faced.” This isn’t just about character assessment. It’s about figuring out how someone might behave when the market turns against them. That insight is hard to glean over earnings calls; it’s the product of hours spent together, over multiple visits, often far from headquarters or investor days.

They also look for businesses that have rebuilt after a fall. They call this the “hubris to humility” cycle. “The bottom is where the growth starts,” Guzzardi notes. And they are ready with capital when others aren’t. One of their largest investments was made on Christmas Eve, after a 40 per cent drawdown. “Everyone else was out for the holidays,” Di Felice shrugs. “We were still paying attention.” Years of relationship-building made it possible. The conviction to act made it real.

Risk, for these two, is not volatility. It’s not even the fear of loss. Risk is not knowing enough. That’s why the fund remains unleveraged, holds no derivatives, and refuses to invest in anything they haven’t deeply understood. “We build the portfolio with capital preservation in mind,” Di Felice says. “If we don’t understand the downside, we hold cash.”

It’s this clarity – on process, on people, and on purpose – that defines the Endeavour Fund. It’s not trying to be everywhere. It’s not trying to own everything. It’s trying to own a handful of exceptional companies that can compound value over time. The rest is patience, humility, and an unshakeable belief in their craft. In an era obsessed with scale and speed, Guzzardi and Di Felice have built something rare: an investing practice grounded in depth, not breadth. And it’s working.