PRIME Leadership-Driven Strategies.
Most investors trade headlines. The serious ones read the operator.
Eighteen years. 221 months of live performance. One discipline: read the operator before you read the model. We do that with in-house analysts, former Wall Street Journal investigative journalists, and former intelligence and law enforcement officers. Three layers, time-weighted, refined for two decades.
Most investors chase price action. We read the people who move it.
Public equity returns get won and lost by the operator. Right CEO. Right incentive. Right moment. That is the most under-modeled driver of asymmetric outcomes in the public market, and the entire process is built around it. Refined across four institutional platforms. Eighteen years. The data is in the report.
Fair warning
This is not for everyone.
If you want a hot tip or a guaranteed return, plenty of people are selling that. We run a process. It takes patience. It takes the willingness to walk away from a name that does not clear the gates. It takes the stomach to hold five positions when the market disagrees with you for a quarter. Expected return is never a story. Risk is a number, not an opinion. Leadership is the asset. If those three lines make you curious rather than uncomfortable, you are in the right place.
The Framework
From the boardroom to the position.
The Edge
Markets misprice leadership.
The work no one else does
Wall Street models the P&L, the TAM, and the competitive map. Almost no one investigates the operator. We do, and we have built the apparatus to do it well: investigative journalists, former intelligence officers, and a leadership-evaluation framework refined across two decades and four institutional platforms.
Twenty years of pattern recognition
The framework is not a checklist. It is a living instrument, calibrated against hundreds of CEOs across every cycle since 2005. Background. Incentives. Capital allocation history. Board dynamics. Personal financial pressure. We read the operator the way intelligence services read a target. Slowly, from many angles, and never trusting the resume.
The Process
Conviction is built, not borrowed.
Universe and screen
No sector mandate. No market cap floor. No geographic box, as long as the security trades in a liquid developed market. We hunt situations where a leadership change, a real pivot, or a hard catalyst sets up the conditions for a rerating.
Validation and sizing
Every thesis clears three gates. Fundamental validation. Named catalysts inside a real time horizon. A 500 bp hurdle over CAPM-implied fair value. If a name does not clear all three, the capital sits in cash. We are paid to wait, not to invest.
The Construct
Five positions. One conviction.
Concentration as design
Five names. Equal weight at entry. Rebalanced quarterly. Concentration is the feature. Past the top five, every additional position dilutes the alpha the research already paid for.
Hedged when it matters
Index puts. Sector ETF shorts. Single-name shorts. Hedges go on when systemic risk earns the cost, and they come off when it does not. Hedging is a tool, not a posture.
The Record
Track record across every cycle.
18.4 years, 221 months
August 2007 through December 2025. The GFC. European debt. The 2015-16 industrial recession. COVID. The 2022 rate shock. Every secular regime, in the same dataset.
The numbers behind the story
19.18% net annualized. Beta 0.21 to the Russell 1000 Equal Weight. Max drawdown 16.5% against the market's 50.8%. Jensen's alpha 15.26%. The Summers framework, the SIC matrix, and the full annual series live inside the Strategy Report.
The Discipline
The work that no one else does.
The Method
A 360-degree view of the operator. Time-weighted, three layers deep.
Reading leadership the way the rest of the market reads earnings is the entire moat. The work is complex to execute and simple to understand. Three layers of analysis run in sequence, each one staffed by a different kind of professional, each one designed to surface what a 10-K and a sell-side note will never tell you. The framework has been refined for two decades across four institutional platforms.
Layer One
The Analysts.
What the company actually needs
In-house analysts diagnose the company before they ever evaluate the operator. Stage in the lifecycle. The strategic problem on the table. The capabilities the next chapter requires. Only then do we ask whether the current management has the right expertise, the right track record, and the right appetite to deliver. Match the leader to the moment, or pass.
Layer Two
The Investigative Journalists.
College to current, on the record
Layer two is staffed by former Wall Street Journal reporters and other tier-one investigative journalists. Their job is the human archaeology. They interview the people who worked alongside the CEO from college through to the current seat. Bosses. Subordinates. Co-founders. The teammates who saw the leader before the leader had a comms team. We do not read the resume. We rebuild it.
Layer Three
Former Intelligence and Law Enforcement.
The deep background
The third layer is run by former intelligence officers and former senior law enforcement. They do the deep background. Criminal record. Civil litigation history, because the way someone sues and gets sued is a window into the personality. The cars they drive. The homes they own. The personal leverage they carry. Personal financial conduct bleeds into corporate financial conduct. Always.
Three layers of evidence get combined into a single conclusion. Value creator, or value destroyer.
We go long the creators. We short the destroyers. Everything else is noise.
The Method
Compounded across every cycle.
18.4 years. 221 months. The GFC, COVID, the 2022 rate shock, all in the same series. Net of a 1% management fee and 20% performance fee with high-water mark. Benchmarked against the Russell 1000 Equal Weight, which is the cleanest test of stock-picking skill that exists.
Net CAGR (18.4 years)
Beta vs R1EW
Max Drawdown
Jensen's Alpha
Past performance is not indicative of future results. The Summers Total Risk-Adjusted Performance Measure (SΩ), the SIC Matrix, the full annual return series, and the methodology footnotes are presented in the Strategy Report.
The Strategist
The hand on the trigger.
Strategies are not portfolios. Strategies are people. The PRIME Leadership-Driven Strategy is run by Karim Mawji, who built the framework, refined it across two decades, and still reads every operator interview himself.
Karim Mawji
Strategist, PRIME Leadership-Driven Strategy
PRIME Family Office
Karim Mawji is the Strategist of the PRIME Leadership-Driven Strategy at PRIME Family Office, based in Naples, Florida, with an office in New York. He owns the investment process end to end: position selection, the leadership-research framework, the investigative oversight, and the final allocation decision.
Karim has run the same concentrated long-short equity discipline for eighteen years across two recessions, a pandemic, and the 2022 rate shock. The framework now used by the PRIME Leadership-Driven Strategy was built across that period, refined operator by operator, and remains the only research method he runs against the public-equity universe.
Earlier in his career, Karim held senior research and portfolio roles in Canadian institutional equities. He is a CFA charterholder and a graduate of the Schulich School of Business at York University, and he sits on the strategy's investment committee and reviews every position it holds.
Full biography included in the Strategy Report.
The Strategy Report
The full file. No pitch deck.
The full file. Eighteen-year annual return series. The Summers risk framework. The SIC matrix. The IPS. The Risk-Adjusted Performance Report. Sent direct. No drip campaign. No nonsense. If you want a thirty-minute call after you read it, you ask. Not the other way around.
- Investment Policy Statement (IPS)
- Risk-Adjusted Performance Report with full Summers framework
- Annual return series, 2007 through 2025
- Capacity, fee structure, and access terms