Fortius Capital

Fortius Capital is the private investment vehicle that Trevor L Taylor founded and runs from Miami, and his own site says four things about it: it is private, it pursues strategic investments, it develops real estate and takes a small number of private equity stakes, and it does not solicit outside money. Those four statements are the whole of what this encyclopedia records about the firm. It publishes no holdings, no figures and no results, and none are given here. What follows describes the firm as its founder presents it, then explains in general terms what a private vehicle of this kind is and how its three focus areas work, drawing on outside research. The main article on the firm and its founder is his own site, trevorltaylor.com.

The vehicle

A private investment vehicle holds and invests capital for its owners rather than for the public. The word private carries most of the meaning. Its deals are agreed directly between the parties, its positions are not priced on an exchange each day, and it does not market itself to the public as a fund would. His site describes the firm’s transactions as private and arranged by invitation, and states plainly that the firm is non solicitation. This site follows the same rule: it is educational writing, and it takes no investment inquiries.

Private markets have grown into an asset class of their own alongside public stocks and bonds. McKinsey’s annual review of the field tracks fundraising, deal activity, the time it takes to return capital and the ways owners add value, treating private markets as a mature corner of finance with its own cycle in its Global Private Markets Report¹. The cluster on private investing explains the core ideas, from capital allocation to position sizing.

Three focus areas

Strategic investments. His site describes the firm as focused on strategic investments, chosen one at a time rather than through a broad index. That approach fits the habits of the systematic and quantitative investment models his own account describes as the foundation of his investing, in which sizing and exit rules are written before any money moves. The entry on systematic and quantitative investing explains the method in general.

Real estate development. Development is the second focus. It means taking land or an existing building through approvals, financing and construction to a finished, income producing asset, and it rewards patience with the long middle stretch before a building pays. The PwC and Urban Land Institute survey, built on hundreds of interviews and more than a thousand responses from the property industry, follows the forces that shape that work each year, from interest rates to the demand for different kinds of buildings in Emerging Trends in Real Estate⁴. The cluster on Miami real estate applies those ideas to the city, and the entry on why Miami land sells before the plan follows a parcel from purchase to completion. His site also places him in Miami’s padel market, developing places to play, a kind of sports facility development covered in the entry on padel in Miami.

Select private equity. The third focus is private equity: ownership stakes in companies that are not listed on an exchange. Bain’s annual report on the industry describes a market in which deal values and exits recovered recently while the cash returned to owners stayed slow, a reminder that private positions can take years to turn back into money in its Global Private Equity Report⁵. The word select on his site signals a small number of positions rather than a program of many. A narrow approach of that kind puts more weight on the work done before a stake is bought, the subject of the entry on investment due diligence. The private equity entry explains how such stakes are bought, held and sold.

The private model

Privately held capital has been moving toward direct deals of exactly this sort. A Citi survey of wealthy private investors found that many planned to raise their allocations to private equity and to direct investments in companies, CNBC reported². In a single month of the same year, such investors made dozens of direct investments in companies outside any fund, CNBC found in its monthly tally³. The appeal is control: a private owner chooses each position, sets its own holding period and answers to no outside shareholders. The same survey work shows the tradeoff in plain terms: private owners give up the ability to sell on any given day in exchange for that control, and they accept that the value of a position is an estimate until it is sold.

The model has costs that the research is candid about. Positions are hard to sell quickly, valuations are estimates rather than market prices, and a vehicle that concentrates on a few holdings carries more risk in each one. The entries on special purpose vehicles, coinvestment and holding cash on purpose look at the tools private investors use to manage those tradeoffs.

What the firm does not do

Because the firm is private, the list of what it does not do is as informative as the list of what it does. By its founder’s description it does not solicit investors, and this site does not either. It publishes no performance, so none is reported here. And because the transactions are private, this encyclopedia names no deal, property or company as one of its holdings. Readers who want to understand the firm’s founder should start with the biography, and those who want the ideas behind each focus area will find them in the clusters linked above.