Breakout Capital

Breakout Capital is a global investment firm designed to capture the opportunities of the next decade, every decade. Founder Ruchir Sharma came from a long career at Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM), where he spent decades running multi-asset portfolios, and advising leading international savings institutions on how to manage them, based on a unique framework for spotting promising assets in what he believed were the most promising countries.

Ruchir founded Breakout Capital in 2022 as an alternative for the many large global investors who are looking to diversify beyond mega cap stocks in the United States. Since its inception, Breakout Capital has been trusted by large pension and sovereign wealth funds for advice on global asset allocation, and to manage emerging market and single country equity funds.

Ruchir’s entire career has been preparation for this enterprise, and this idea. As he has for decades, Ruchir continues to travel the world, studying and learning the cyclical rhythms of markets, large and small. From his travels and research, Ruchir developed 10 rules for identifying the markets most likely to “break out” —meaning outperform their competition over the next three to five years. The 10 rules shape our country selection process at Breakout Capital.

As a key portfolio manager on Ruchir’s team at MSIM, Managing Partner Swanand Kelkar developed a framework for identifying firms with the potential to remain or become “consistent compounders,” targeting 15 percent annualized returns in absolute terms. This framework is the backbone of our stock selection process. The head of our flagship EM strategy is another top veteran of Ruchir’s MSIM team, Steven Quattry.

The firm is built as well on Ruchir’s long-standing relationship with Greg Fleming, a Morgan Stanley alum who is now CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management (RCM). Working to transform what started out as the Rockefeller family fund into a global investment firm, Fleming welcomed Breakout Capital as a new strategic partner in RCM’s growing international arm.

Breakout Capital runs its worldwide operations out of offices in New York and Mumbai. Our veteran board of advisers features members with extensive experience running global multi-asset portfolios on a large scale. Its members are  Vikram Pandit (former CEO of Citigroup, now Chairman and CEO of The Orogen Group); Erik Serrano Berntsen (formerly of Bain & Co., now CEO of Stable Asset Management); Cyril Moullé-Berteaux (formerly of MSIM and Traxis Partners); Vindi Banga (formerly Unilever, now Partner at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice) and Manju Juneja (formerly Barclays Capital and NWI Management LP).

Breakout Capital’s team of more than a dozen investment professionals also travel constantly, reading the mood and assessing the prospects of markets all over the world. Our extensive contacts among high level policy makers and business leaders give us unique insight into macro trends, and policy changes likely to impact the markets. This kind of on-the-ground research is vital to ranking economies, converting these insights into investment ideas, designing and rebalancing portfolios, managing portfolio risk, and implementing trades across public and private markets.

Breakout Capital’s profile as an entrepreneurial venture with deeply established roots offers particularly valuable advantages in a global environment like this one, marked by disruption and unusually high levels of concentration in one sector and a few countries. For more on our Outlook, visit our “Strategy” tab.