About

Pravda Capital

Why we love what we do

Story of Pravda Capital

Pravda Capital is an asset manager and advisor, with over twenty years long track record in complex finance. Our abilities and values are reflected in it.
Over the past two decades we have evolved from an M&A advisory, trading in securities and energy, via a friends & family hedge fund, into a licensed hedge fund, managing our and client’s capital. It was not easy.

As a boutique founded in 2003, we completed numerous complex transactions in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), worth several billion CZK. Among them, Orco’s acquisition of IPB Real (at that time the largest residential developer) and the financial restructuring/sale of Aliatel (at that time the largest private telco).

In 2005, we entered into green energy trading (mostly emissions) and were the leaders in it in CEE for years, trading billions of € with hundreds of clients. Notably, in May 2006 we were the first (in the world), to correctly predict the collapse of the emissions market to zero. In 2017 we left this market as it remained marred by politics.

Since then, we fully focused on the development of our automated investment strategy and corresponding management structure. Although we launched a hedge fund as early as 2009, it was offered only to friends and family. While it outperformed CEE, it required further investment into research and development so it could successfully invest globally and be offered globally.

Even though we obtained a licence for self managed Professional Investment Fund (PIF) offering a fully automated global investment strategy based on a combination of asset pricing theory, machine learning and rigorous empirical testing, we resolved not to offer this fund to the public at the end of 2020.

We arrived to this painful decision due to the following reasons: (1) COVID 19 pandemic resulted not in a deep attitude change and cleansing crisis, but unprecedented liquidity injections (mostly blind) resulting in general distortion of understanding of risk among investors and business people, skyrocketing national debts and national banks i.e. "return to new normal", (2) market valuations were decoupled from reality and mounting megarisk, i.e. Shiller PE (one of the few forward looking return indicators) indicates negligible returns for next decades for an investor, facing unprecedented headwinds in form of  national debts mostly over 100% of GDP (often more than double Maastricht criteria, as if they were mere formality), national banks bloated ten times and more, liberal world swept by a wave of populism and wars not seen last 30 years of bull market, and .... climate change, the mother of all risks being negleglected as some science lab experiment, (3) Malta went through a regulatory crisis, which damaged our trust into the stability of the jurisdiction and our ability to operate such a complex strategy from there.

While we remain convinced that our strategy is interesting for somewhat healthy global markets, we force ourselves to wait untill measures such as Shiller PE return to somewhat heatly levels. Untill then, we work on investments outside the public markets and some singular special situations in them.      

We are not just machines

Jan Pravda - CEO Pravda Capital

Jan Pravda

CEO

Jan studied geophysics at Charles University and finance at Cornell University in New York, USA. In 2009, Jan launched a hedge fund with the long term goal to develop an investment strategy of an exceptional quality which can later be offered to investors. Since its foundation, the fund outperformed relevant CEE indexes by a margin wider than 10% per year and the global long short strategy outperformed its benchmark in 2016 and 2017 combined. Before founding his company, Jan served as a Managing Director and a Member of the Board of Patria Finance, and  gained global investment banking experience with Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston in London and New York. His first experience with mathematical modeling was in early 1990’s in geophysical practise and in academia in the US.

Case study to download

A real case study on the efficiency and stability of our investment strategy. Real numbers are used in the study. Inputs and outputs are based on real numbers.

* We cover all costs in excess of 1%, so NO additional charges levied on investors.

Our mission

We want to help transform the way people accumulate, protect, multiply and access their wealth.

Our values

  • Considerate Risk Takers:
    We do our homework, consider what we see (and what we do not), take a stance. We don’t settle for good enough. We do everything to the fullest.
  • Work Hard, Learn, Grow:
    We learn by doing, and value initiative and personal exploration (read, listen, work, collaborate, stop, and work).
  • Respect:
    We support and respect our teammates, community, and nature.
  • Team and Client:
    We define shared goals, and work as a team to achieve them.
  • Communication from the Outset:
    We listen first, then talk, and collaborate and share views.