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James Sym

Portfolio Manager

James joined Goodhart in 2025. He has 18 years’ experience as an investor, of which 14 years are as a European portfolio manager. James started his career at Cazenove where he launched his first fund, before Cazenove was acquired by Schroders where he ran the award-winning European Alpha strategies, ultimately managing over £2.5bn of client’s capital. He left Schroders in 2020 to launch a European franchise at River Global, becoming appointed Head of Equities in 2022.

At Goodhart, James continues to provide investment services to the RGI European fund as Investment Advisor. He also works closely with other members of the investment team, bringing his stock-picking skills and business-cycle approach to other Goodhart funds, most notably the Real Return strategy.

James holds a Masters degree from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences, specialising in materials technology and mineral physics, and has completed the CFA.

James is a contrarian but pragmatic investor who tends to populate portfolios with companies that are out of favour for a specific reason, where that is starting to change either for macroeconomic, industry or idiosyncratic reasons. James has developed a philosophy and process which allows him to effectively identify inflection points utilising the concepts of a the business cycle and company cycle, which works because human nature tends to over extrapolate recent history, and because success tends to attract competition. James tends to have a value-orientation, but this is captured across a multitude of different relative and absolute valuation approaches rather than a simply low current valuation multiples. Exploiting market inefficiencies by meeting companies with promising metrics is an important part of the process. He aims to capture turning points at both a portfolio level and company level, while using the business cycle framework to construct a portfolio that reflects the 'world view' from a risk management perspective. 

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