The funds manager who made her dream of ‘something better’ a reality

When investment guru Geoff Wilson copped a backlash for saying women were better investors, Armina Rosenberg leapt to his defence. Now she’s a funds manager under the Future Generation program.

Minotaur Capital fund manager Armina Rosenberg in Sydney. Picture: Britta Campion

Armina Rosenberg had just set up her own funds management company, Minotaur Capital, when she read that veteran Australian fund manager Geoff Wilson had declared that women were better investors than men.

When Wilson received a backlash for his comments, Rosenberg, who was a fund manager for the family office of Atlassian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, decided to message him privately.

“He (Wilson) had all these people blasting him for it,” Rosenberg recalled in an interview with The Australian ahead of International Women’s Day.

“People were like ‘Why don’t you have a sex change?’ and all sorts of other awful stuff. What he was trying to say is that if you look empirically to all the studies which have been done, female fund managers have outperformed male fund managers.

“I responded in support. I told him, ‘I couldn’t agree more’.”

Wilson invited Rosenberg to be one of 12 women fund managers managing capital pro bono for his Future Generation Women, a philanthropic investment fund aimed at driving gender equality in Australia.

The unlisted trust, seeded with $100m from Nicola and Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, is the third investment vehicle under the Future Generation umbrella of philanthropic investment companies.

While Rosenberg’s Minotaur’s Global Opportunities Fund is still only small, at $20m, Wilson’s selection has been good for her fund and for her profile.

Born in Sydney of Indonesian parents, Rosenberg, 37, likes to say that she is the first woman of colour in Australia to set up her own fund, having started it before Chinese-born Jun Bei Liu’s Ten Cap this year. (Liu is another Future Generation Women fund manager.)

“People could say I’ve been lucky,” Rosenberg says of her career. “But it’s a combination of luck and being proactive.”

As for whether Wilson’s claim that women are better fund managers than men can be proven or not, Rosenberg argues that funds management is a broad church which benefits from diversity of thinking.

“It is not about diversity for diversity’s sake, but it is about having a diversity of perspective,” she says. “One of the cool things about investing is that there are so many different stocks and so many different ways to make money.

“If you can make money in a different way to someone else it is a great thing.”

Rosenberg grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, the daughter of an Indonesian single mother who put herself through a TAFE course and then did a Masters degree in Commerce, while bringing up three children in a housing commission home.

Geoff Wilson’s views about women being superior investors were unpopular with some. Picture: Ben Searcy

“I always dreamed of something better,” she recalls. “I wanted to work in the city and make myself rich enough not to have to worry about putting food on the table and have the same struggle which my mum had.”

After graduating from the University of NSW, she joined UBS as an intern in the resources equities team, working on coverage of Whitehaven Coal. She joined JPMorgan as a research analyst and then as an adviser at Robert Whyte’s Audant Investments.

Rosenberg rose to prominence at Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures, where she worked for six years, focusing on a portfolio concentrated mainly in global software companies. She left in 2023 when Cannon-Brookes decided to focus his private investments on decarbonisation.

Her partner at Minotaur is tech investor Thomas Rice, who managed the Perpetual Global Innovation Share Fund.

Rosenberg says one of the points of difference of Minotaur’s approach is its use of artificial intelligence in investment analysis. The firm has developed its own portfolio management software, Taurient, to help to identify potential investment opportunities.

“Our unique selling proposition is that we use artificial intelligence and large language models to help generate ideas, triage ideas and do deeper research on the stocks we are looking at,” she says. “It means we are a lot more efficient, and we do things cheaper, better and faster.”

Specifically, she is looking for companies whose shares are mispriced by the market. “We collect about 35,000 articles a week from a whole bunch of different news sources and use them to look for companies which are undergoing a strategy change.”

This has led to a diverse range of investments in the Minotaur Global Opportunities Fund which was launched last May.

Its top holdings include Polish video game developer CD Projekt, the maker of The Witcher series; French multinational Cie de Saint-Gobain, a global leader in sustainable construction materials; COVER Corporation, a Japanese tech company specialising in virtual YouTubers; and IperionX, an American materials technology company focused on developing sustainable titanium production methods which is listed on the ASX.

Its US stocks include Facebook owner Meta, database technology company MongoDB, chip developer Nvidia cyber security software company CyberArk.

While it has done well from its holdings in US stocks, the fund is positioned more strongly outside of Wall Street in the belief that there are now more attractive valuations in Europe, Japan and emerging markets.

Rosenberg recently joined an Australian business delegation visiting Indonesia.

She initially questioned her own qualifications for the role, given she doesn’t speak Bahasa and grew up in a time of tensions in the Australia-Indonesia relationship including the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta.

But things have changed. “I feel like I am an embodiment of Australia-Indonesia relations,” she says. “Things are a lot more amenable, and the relationship is probably in one of the best positions it has ever been, particularly with (former Macquarie chief executive) Nicholas Moore with his Southeast Asian economic strategy to 2040 report looking to improve relationships between the two countries … I want my daughters to feel very Australian like I do but have this sense of their culture and identity as being Indonesian as well.”

Future Generation Women waive their management and performance fees to allow for a donation of 1 per cent of assets to not-for-profits each year.

That will benefit organisations trying to improve financial literacy for women and their children, and access to employment for women from lower incomes including older women, Indigenous women, and those from rural and regional areas.