Insights
Salt & Pathfinder's Ethical Trans-Tasman Fund

Salt is a sister company of Pathfinder, owned by Alvarium. They're an active, boutique fund manager with a long track record of delivering strong risk adjusted returns to clients.

Their investment philosophy centres on share markets having characteristics that lead to market inefficiencies that can be utilised over time to deliver superior risk adjusted returns.

Salt has a well-resourced investment team of highly qualified professionals who have multi-decade experience over multiple investment cycles. The investment team dedicates it’s time to creating significant levels of proprietary in-house research which is a strong competitive advantage.

We would hope that this will occur quickly – Salt’s strong track record speaks for itself. However, note that past returns are not a guarantee of future returns which may be affected by a range of factors outside Salt’s control.

The portfolio managers involved in this will be Matthew Goodson and Paul Harrison.

ESG is a crucial element of the Salt Funds Management investment decision-making process and Salt is a strong believer in the merits of embedding comprehensive ESG analysis into its investment process. This, combined with Pathfinder's market leading ethical approach, is a compelling alignment suited to delivering beneficial investment outcomes for Pathfinder’s clients.

There will be no additional fees or costs charged to the Pathfinder Ethical Trans-Tasman Fund for the appointment of Salt. While Pathfinder will pay a fee to Salt, this does not impact the management fee charged to investors of any fund.

We expect this change will be fully implemented by the end of the week (that commenced 19 January 2026). Salt have been familiarising themselves with our Trans-Tasman portfolio over the last 6 weeks.

Salt is part of the same group of companies as Pathfinder and they are therefore a related party. Pathfinder will pay Salt a fee to manage the portfolio – this fee is not paid by the fund. We recognise that any appointment needs to be in the best interests of our investors.

To ensure this is the case we have reviewed Salt’s investment process and return history, and we have also taken market soundings from a small number of third party professionals familiar with Trans-Tasman equity managers. Our Supervisor (Public Trust) has been kept up to date through this process. More detail on how we deal with conflicts, related party transactions and our duty to our investors can be found on pages 7 and 8 of our OMI document.

The appointment of Salt does not change anything with client statements or reporting on our online portal.

The performance of our Ethical Trans-Tasman strategy is measured against its benchmark, which is a 50/50 composite of the NZX50 index / ASX200 Index (Gross of dividends and tax, 50% hedged to NZD).  This does not change and is the measure we will also be using to assess the risk and return outcomes delivered by Salt.  Our performance monitoring also includes measuring volatility against the benchmark and measuring returns against the mean (or median) of a sample of Australasian equity PIE funds.

Investment in Trans-Tasman shares should have a long time horizon, which we describe in our offer documents as a “medium to long-term time frame of 8-10 years”. We will continually review manager performance and can make a change if there is sustained underperformance.  We are, however, expecting that this appointment will significantly strengthen our Trans-Tasman investment proposition.