Jan Hummel has been investing since he was a teenager in Sweden, when he convinced his parents to let him participate in an industrial firm’s IPO on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Later converting to the gospel of value investing with help from a copy of Securities Analysis that he picked up while working as a young Merrill Lynch banker, Jan went on to start one of Europe’s first value investing funds under the umbrella of Paradigm Capital, an investment advisory firm he founded in 2001 after spending a decade spearheading restructuring and turn around private equity transactions across the continent.
Launched in 2007 with fellow value investing disciples Bruce Greenwald and Mario Gabelli, Jan’s Paradigm Capital Value Fund creates its edge through highly disciplined, deep fundamental research. The fund targets small- to mid-cap companies with proven earnings, limited financial leverage, and smart management that are located in northern European territories where it has expertise. Through this focused approach, Jan has made investments that have returned six and seven times invested cash, showing that the old value-investing principles of sticking with quality and buying what one knows are still as relevant in Europe. He holds a MS degree in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Jan is a Swedish national and resides in Munich Germany. At the 2017 Santangel’s Investor Forum, he will speak on two investment cases from Germany and Sweden.