Lily SMA
Lily SMA is the public-markets core of Lily Funds — separately managed accounts in marketable securities for a select group of family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
The Lily philosophy.
The approach is thematic. Find the themes worth a decade of attention, then buy into them at prices that still make sense — the intersection of value discipline and the technological shift already underway.
The family office structure is what allows it: bespoke strategy, built account by account, without the constraints that come with broader registration. The years at PIMCO supplied the rest — active management, diversification across strategies rather than across tickers, and attention held on intermediate- to long-term fundamentals while macro and secular trends run their course.
Every position is asked to carry more than one source of value. Positioning is built for scenarios rather than predictions. And relationships are built to outlast any single cycle — short-term distraction being the reliable enemy of high-conviction work.
The school we come from.
Nothing here is novel, and that is the point. The philosophy is borrowed from the investors who proved it across half a century — then applied to markets they never had the chance to price.
Warren Buffett
Margin of safety, circle of competence, and the patience to hold cash until the price is right.
Stanley Druckenmiller
Preserve capital first — then, when conviction is high, concentrate and swing hard.
Leon Cooperman
Skeptical value. Do the work, question the story, buy the numbers.
The story of Rocket Lab at four dollars.
When the space sector was out of favor, Lily did the work on Rocket Lab: real launch cadence, real spacecraft revenue, a founder with an unmatched record — priced like a concept stock. The position was built around four dollars a share.
The stock has since traded above ninety-nine. The lesson wasn't the multiple — it was that the discipline travels: the frontier can be analyzed like any other business, if you insist on doing the analysis.
How a Lily portfolio is built.
Most of the portfolio is built to be boring. A deliberate minority is not. There is very little in between — and that is the whole risk posture.
An anchor of compounders
Durable, cash-generative businesses hold the floor of every account — the positions that let the rest of the portfolio think in decades.
Early thematic conviction
Concentrated positions in the themes defining the next decade, taken before consensus arrives — the Rocket Lab playbook, repeated with discipline.
Picks and shovels
The suppliers the big themes cannot do without — names like AmpliTech, Mobilicom, and LightPath — where a small company meets a very large customer.
Structural tailwinds
Policy sets the clock. The NDAA requires the Department of Defense to purge Chinese, Russian, Iranian, North Korean and Belarusian optical systems by January 1, 2030 — a hard deadline, not a preference — and NATO members increasingly demand non-Chinese drone communications. Mandates like these create buyers who have no alternative.
Where the thinking lives.
The Lily Letter is where the reasoning gets written down at length — what a theme actually rests on, why a price made sense, and what would change the view. Short notes go up on X.
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