”90% of all information on the stock market is noise”, says Jonas Jakobson, founder of Nordic Equities, a fund management company with 30 years of experience of the financial industry. “For the small investor, it is important to see through the noise, take a long-term view and invest in companies with a proven track record of long-term earnings growth” he says.
Jonas Jakobson is not particularly interested in the stock market. This may seem strange for a person who has worked all his adult life in the financial industry and who founded the fund company Nordic Equities, where he is still the main shareholder and head of asset management. “No, I’m not that interested in the stock market per se. We are interested in finding companies that can have a good long-term development, not whether the stock market is 1 or 2% up or down, there are others who are good at trading,” says Jakobson when Aktiespararna meets him at the office in Stockholm. His interest in investments started during his studies at Stockholm University in the 1980s, he first worked for six months at a stock picking firm in New York and then visited some 60 managers in Europe and North America while working on his thesis on international investment strategies. He then moved on to Öhmans and Handelsbanken before founding Nordic Equities in 1993. From initially acting as an adviser and broker for foreign institutions, it is now a pure asset manager, with foundations as its main client group, but its investors also include insurance companies, family offices, pension funds, banks, and private individuals (minimum investment €5000). Nordic Equities currently manages around SEK 2 billion in five funds and around 130 different holdings.