Dear reader,

We’re kicking off 2026 with great momentum across public equities and venture.

Here’s what we’ve been working on!

— All of us at Titanium Birch

Peter 👽

We’ve made lots of progress in public equities. We’ve now gone through a full cycle of this:

• Decide our desired exposures. We define those in terms of the Fama French factors, plus target ranges for geos and sectors, plus a few overrides to “reduce exposure to what looks like impactful nonsense” that builds on our work in calculating implied growth rates where we filter for companies that are already huge yet also priced to have to grow quickly from huge to humongous. Stocks at such prices might have a lot more to lose than to gain, so we’re careful about getting too much exposure to them. We’ve built a process that inserts some human judgment but also has constraints in place to keep it systematic.

• Calculate our actual exposures, including look-throughs on ETFs, based on programmatic access to the financial statements of thousands of public companies worldwide.

• Calculate the deltas.

• Calculate the set of trades needed to make the deltas sufficiently small. This involves directly holding many hundreds of single stocks around the world, plus some focused ETFs.

• Place the orders and get them executed.

• Reconcile and repeat.

Most of this is already automated. I’m proud of what the team has achieved and how quickly we learned new skills. We’re now improving various pieces of our process iteratively. Since it’s already running end-to-end, even small changes now directly translate to impact. More on that from Zsolt and TJ below.

We’re also actively looking to increase our exposure to young and high-growth companies across the entire spectrum from startup to near IPO.

We think of that slice of the portfolio as three these sleeves:

1. “VC beta”: We invest in VC funds where the managers and founders are geographically far away from us, and we’re less likely to be particularly involved.

2. “VC mentors”: We invest in VC funds where we build close relationships with the fund managers and some of the founders in their portfolios. We aim to be useful along the way and learn a lot in the process.

3. Directs. We engage directly with startup founders (see our founders page) and make our own investments. Last month we made our first direct investment into a new startup run by ExpressVPN alumni.

Another satisfying highlight: we were looking at ways to get exposure to our desired set of mainland China stocks. We had heard that structured products might be quite attractive in that market for various reasons, so we got some quotes for specific products. At first glance, some of them looked very attractive. Then the team quickly ran the numbers by coding up the logic of the underlying product, feeding in historical data, and visualising the payoffs. That helped us understand the gotchas and nuances and quickly make a decision.

It looked like this:

It’s fun for me to have such a broad range of skills on the team that we can do these analyses.

Zsolt 🌶️

Single stock sprouting 🌱

After experimenting with factor tilting last quarter, we took the next step and tried it out in a real part of the portfolio. We built a prototype tool that helps us manage single-stock investing at scale. In simple terms, it can:

• Suggest what we’d like to hold based on themes like a value tilt

• Compare that with what we currently own

• Create a set of trading instructions we can use with our broker

• Do all of this across hundreds of individual stocks

Once we had a good handle on single stocks, we spent a couple of weeks diving into China equities and learning more about the risks and special characteristics of that market. We looked at several existing funds, but none of them really matched what we needed — so we decided to build our own solution instead.

That meant creating a custom index from scratch, including:

• Selecting the companies ourselves

• Choosing which shares to use when there were dual listings

• Deciding how to weight each stock

• Making the trades happen across multiple exchanges

What’s next

This quarter involved a lot of fast prototyping, since we wanted to explore ideas quickly and build up as much learning as possible. Now we’re taking some time to tidy up the code and turn what we’ve built into something more solid that we can rely on long-term.

I’m also really excited to start tracking how the new portfolio performs — especially the impact of the single-stock decisions we’ve made. It’ll help us understand what’s working well, what could be improved, and how we can keep sharpening our investment process over time.

TJ 🤖

What’s in a portfolio? ⚖️

When we started our equities portfolio, we had a somewhat vague idea of a globally diversified, profitability, value, and size oriented portfolio. That doesn’t sound that groundbreaking, but when you get down to specifics, we have had to make many decisions that have varying degrees of impact on the ultimate composition and performance of the portfolio.

Decisions on the strategy front:

• How do we deal with the fact that the US comprises 50% of global market capitalisation but 25% of its GDP?

• How do we deal with H shares and the fact that prices can vary for A vs H for the same issuing company?

• Do we strictly rely on market capitalisation or do we use indices that have some profitability screens? This is salient for US small caps where a large proportion have negative earnings.

We learned a lot comparing ETFs and market indices against each other. Japanese broad market indices are virtually identical…

…whereas some US Mid-cap indices are almost completely different.

We also had decisions to make on the execution front:

• What measures do we use for factor tilting? For value, do we use P/E or P/B, or an amalgamation of both? What if there is no P/E due to negative earnings?

• Which vehicle do we use to minimise tax and fee drag? How much do we save in management fees vs reduced taxes on UCITS-compliant vehicles? Where do single stocks make sense?

Whenever we encountered these decisions, we tried our best to make a sensible one, document the decision, and then move forward. We can’t say with certainty whether they were the right decisions, but by documenting them, we hope to trace each one through to the P/L over the short and long term. Because it can take years for us to really know the impact of these decisions, isolating and quantifying their impact becomes very important.

Moving forward

Now that we have a first version of our public equities portfolio working, we’re taking a break to shore up technical debt and prune some experimental tangents that didn’t provide value. We’ll then tackle a backlog of many things we want to research, experiment with, implement, and monitor.

If helping us do this work interests you, we’re hiring!

Val 🌚

This past quarter, we’ve been focused on building out the VC portfolio - taking lots of meetings, refining our strategy, and shaping our perspective on how/where we want to invest. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with different people across the ecosystem - there’s always something to learn, and hearing different perspectives has been incredibly valuable.

We also had the chance to look at a few direct deal opportunities. Evaluating businesses adds a different dimension - more complex, with multiple moving parts to consider. It’s challenging, but intellectually rewarding, and I’m keen to explore this space further over time.

While VC has been the focus, I’ve continued to stay close to what’s happening across the broader private markets landscape - especially with our global mandate in mind. Keeping that context helps inform how we think about risk, return, and exposure holistically.

On a lighter note, we wrapped up 2025 with a (non-edible) gingerbread-making session - fun, festive, and creative (thanks Justina!).

Reading-wise, I just finished Venture Deals and am going to start on Secrets of Sand Hill Road. Plenty more in the backlog as I continue deepening my understanding of the venture space.

Looking ahead, I’m keen to dive deeper into VC and direct-deal investing, and excited to build out the programme as we shape and sharpen our strategy.

Justina 🐯

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking to lots of people in venture, developing a lay of the land and refining our judgment.

One thing that’s already clear is how much branding, reputation, and networks reflect a person’s point of view. I find it rejuvenating to meet people with sharply different worldviews and to see how they choose to allocate their time and resources to shape the world they want to live in. Each encounter pushes me to reflect on my instincts, challenge my biases, and clarify trade-offs. (Also, I’ve been struck by the generosity of the people we’ve met, eager to make introductions, offer pointers, and walk us through the things they wish they’d known when they were starting out.)

I’m also enjoying the iterative nature of venture. Each conversation gives us a more precise sense of what we’re looking for, like a sculptor chiselling away at a block of marble. One of my responsibilities is to make sure our outward-facing brand reflects our evolving taste with clarity and intent.

On a more personal note, one of my goals this year is to grow more confident in expressing my own point of view. I’ve joked in the past that I “have no opinions,” but that’s obviously not true! Disagreement sharpens our thinking, like iron on iron. Being wrong (or occasionally putting a foot in my mouth) is part of the fun if it means we arrive at ideas better than the ones we began with. Lately, I’ve even surprised myself by how much conviction and passion can creep into my voice when I think something matters. Pretty neat!

Who we’re hoping to hear from 📬

Founders. If you’re in Singapore or Hong Kong building something globally relevant, we’d love to connect. We write checks from $100k to $500k and work closely with founders who value high trust and direct communication. See if we’re a fit.

Software engineers. We’re hiring engineers to build the systems that power our investment process. If you love working at the intersection of code and capital, learn more about the role.

ICYMI from the blog 💻

• Spotting implausible growth assumptions in US large-caps by TJ

If you found this newsletter interesting, we’d be grateful if you could pass it along to a friend or leave a comment.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in!

Disclaimer: The content in this post should not be taken as investment advice.