Q: Are there any common themes among the businesses you’re finding in the market right now?
Krishna Mohanraj, CFA
I would say the most interesting thing is that there's no common theme. We are finding ideas in different sectors, different geographies. All of them are unique businesses that don't really fit any particular mold, and they don't fall into any particular global narrative that's going around. In fact, I would say that's the big strength of our strategy is that we own a collection of fairly unique businesses.
And the additions in Q3 are just kind of a sample of what the whole portfolio is. So just look at what we bought so far. You have a global insurance brokerage business; you have a McDonald's franchiser in Latin America; you have a Paris-based global company that does water-based energy management; you have the operator of the stock exchange in Mexico; and finally, you have a fund management platform in Europe called Allfunds.
I'll expand on Allfunds a little bit. Allfunds is a European asset management platform, very unique business. It basically connects your fund managers with capital providers. In fact, it's the largest such fund platform in Europe with approximately one and a half trillion euros in assets. And you think about it, it's sort of a marketplace, right? You get the marketplace type effects, network effects on both sides; assets growing about 20%, which is surprising given the size of that asset base. Relatively long history so you can see that there is a stickiness to the client base, and it's trading at a cheap valuation. From our perspective, all they need to do is keep growing — keep doing what they're doing. So that is Allfunds.
I will just repeat the key statement saying that there is really no theme to what we're finding. And for long-term investors, I think we are just finding the best exposures that we can to these markets. And right now, some of them are on sale, so we are just happy to do what we're doing.