Elevation Capital joins forces with Blackbull analyst Eden Bradfield
Elevation Capital founder Chris Swasbrook is expecting that the huge following Blackbull Markets analyst Eden Bradfield has built up will be instrumental in helping to grow the size of his firm’s funds under management, currently $175 million.
Wednesday, April 16th 2025, 8:28AM
by Jenny Ruth
Elevation Capital founder Chris Swasbrook is expecting that the huge following Blackbull Markets analyst Eden Bradfield has built up will be instrumental in helping to grow the size of his firm’s funds under management, currently $175 million.
Bradfield’s readership of his investment newsletter is approaching 10,000.
“The time was right to look at expanding the number of people in the firm and to think about the firm for the future,” Swasbrook told GoodReturns.
Swasbrook, 51, has retained a 16% stake in Elevation while Blackbull’s Michael Walker and Selwyn Loekman have taken a 39% stake in their personal capacity while Delta Insurance’s Ian Pollard and Teresa Pollard hold 26.5%.
Swasbrook says he has known both Walker and Loekman for years, the NZ funds management industry being a relatively small community.
Bradfield, who has previously worked for Elevation nearly a decade ago, has a 2.5% stake in Elevation and says this is the first time he’s owned a stake in the firm he works for.
“It does make a difference,” Bradfield says, noting that he’s much more conscious of spending money now.
Bradfield’s investment style is very much influenced by the principles espoused by the legendary Warren Buffett, “the sage of Omaha,” (Omaha being his home town in Nebraska, US) and his former partner, the now deceased but equally as legendary Charlie Munger.
Bradfield was apparently already an investment nerd when he was just 11 years old and bought a book about Buffett’s investment style, The Warren Buffett Way.
While he does pay attention to metrics such as price-to-earnings ratios, Bradfield says he’s more focused on what a company does, the quality of the business and its prospects and the quality of the team running it.
“I would probably put more emphasis on the quality aspects.”
Readers of Bradfield’s newsletter will likely already know of his penchant for famous luxury brands.
“I’ve always been interested in fashion,” he says, adding that he had been captivated as a teenager by Karl Lagerfeld’s outspokenness as well as by Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo who founded Comme des Garçons.
Bradfield says he’s fascinated by businesses that are selling an image rather than their actual products, noting that people can’t just buy a Hermes Birkin bag, they have to become loyal customers before being invited to buy a Birkin.
“You can’t set the price at whatever you want, but you do have a greater pricing power - they’re not really selling a product,” he says.
But the power of a brand doesn’t necessarily guarantee investment success, as Bradfield confesses he learnt the hard way by buying into the Dr Martens stock about when it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021: “It’s fallen off a cliff,” he says of the share price.
Floated at 370 British pence per share, Dr Martens is now trading at a little above 50p.
Apparently making almost indestructible shoes, even if your brand is iconic, doesn’t create much repeat business.
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