Names tell a story. Zadig, the firm, takes its name from Voltaire’s philosophical tale of a wise man who reaches the truth through careful observation of small, overlooked details. Its flagship strategy, Memnon, draws on the ancient legend of a warrior whose armour, struck by the rising sun, was said to emit a clear and resonant sound — a metaphor, the team suggests, for a portfolio that responds purely to genuine signals rather than to noise. These are not incidental choices. They reflect a firm whose investment philosophy is, at its core, about seeing what others miss and acting on it with conviction. Zadig Asset Management was founded in London in 2005 and has spent the past two decades building a reputation as one of Europe’s most distinctive active equity managers. The firm is majority employee-owned, operates from offices in London and Luxembourg, and today employs a team of fourteen people. Its 2020 partnership with iM Global Partner gives it access to a broad international distribution network while preserving the independence and focus that have always been central to its culture. The firm today manages approximately $1.3 billion in assets across its European equity strategies.
A philosophy rooted in market inefficiency
Zadig’s investment philosophy originates in a simple but powerful observation: equity markets have a structural bias towards comfort. Investors consistently overpay for companies they perceive as safe, assigning a premium to familiar names, dominant franchises and predictable earnings at the expense of more complex or temporarily unloved businesses. This “comfort bias,” as Zadig calls it, creates a systematic mispricing opportunity for a patient, conviction-driven investor willing to go where consensus does not.
The firm’s response to this inefficiency is an approach that is simultaneously opportunistic and disciplined. Portfolios are built from a small number of high-conviction ideas, each selected on the basis of a rigorous internal valuation process and a clear view that the upside to fair value materially exceeds the downside risk, and crucially, that a credible path to re-rating exists, whether through a catalyst, a change in market perception, or the gradual recognition of underlying value. The team is contrarian by temperament but not ideological: it does not screen for low multiples or tilt systematically towards any style. On the contrary, one of Zadig’s most important commitments is to remain style-neutral at all times, maintaining a balanced exposure across sector and sytles (cyclical and defensive, growth and value) and continuously monitoring and constraining factor exposures. The portfolio must, at every point, reflect the quality of the team’s stock-picking rather than a disguised bet on any macro or factor theme.
It means that Zadig’s flagship strategy, Memnon European Equity, cannot be replicated by any factor-tilted or smart-beta ETF, however sophisticated, and that the strategy’s behaviour in a portfolio is driven almost entirely by idiosyncratic, company-specific returns.
The investment process
Zadig’s process is resolutely bottom-up. The team builds its own proprietary valuation models from the ground up, meets regularly with company management, and applies a consistent analytical framework that integrates ESG considerations directly into the fundamental case rather than as a separate compliance layer. No position is initiated unless the team can identify and justify a meaningful upside relative to a realistic assessment of the risks involved.
Their portfolios are highly concentrated, typically containing between twenty and thirty positions drawn from the team’s best ideas among mid to large-cap European companies. Active share sits at approximately ninety per cent relative to the reference index. Position sizing is driven by conviction, not by benchmark weight, and the portfolios follow what Zadig calls a philosophy of “research, conviction and control”: every holding is continuously challenged against its original thesis, and only the best ideas remain in the portfolio. Risk-adjusted return potential is assessed daily, and the portfolio turns over with sufficient frequency to reflect evolving opportunities without becoming short-termist in character.
Proprietary quantitative tools are used to monitor and control factor exposures both at the holding and at the portfolio level, ensuring that the strong idiosyncratic signals coming from stock selection are not obscured or overwhelmed by unintended macro or style bets. Analysis of the strategy’s tracking error attribution shows that more than eighty per cent of its active risk is idiosyncratic in origin, with contributions from market, size, value, momentum and investment factors all negligible.
The team
The active investment team at Zadig is led by two partners, Vincent Steenman and Régis Bégué.
Steenman first joined Zadig in 2007, learning the firm’s investment culture alongside its founders through the Global Financial Crisis, before leaving in 2012 to manage European equities at Morgan Stanley, Carmignac and Sata Capital. He returned in 2020, more than a decade later, and by choice, a decision that speaks for itself about his conviction in the philosophy. A graduate of École Polytechnique and HEC Paris, he has played a central role in the firm’s European equities capabilities and has co-managed Memnon European Equity since February 2023. Bégué’s arrival in April 2024 was equally considered. A graduate of HEC Paris, he had known and worked alongside Zadig’s founding members for decades. When the time came to move on from Lazard Frères Gestion, where he had spent nearly two decades as a Managing Director overseeing a team of twenty people managing €10 billion in European, US and Japanese equities, joining Zadig was a natural next step built on shared convictions and longstanding trust. The broader team also includes Aurélien Favre, an equity analyst with a background in mathematics from Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, previously at Goldman Sachs and Ananda AM.
Zadig AM flagship strategy: Memnon European Equity
Launched in February 2011, Memnon European Equity has now accumulated more than fourteen years of live performance history. Since inception, the strategy has delivered a net annualised return of 9.8% compared with 7.8% for the MSCi Europe Index. The frequency of outperformance is particularly compelling: over rolling threeyear, five-year and ten-year periods, the strategy has outperformed its reference index in 100% of observations, with an average annual excess return of approximately 4.7% across those horizons.
What the long-term track record reflects is not a bet that happened to pay off, but the compounding effect of a genuinely differentiated process. Memnon European Equity ranks at the 86th percentile of the eVestment PanEurope Core Equity universe in terms of idiosyncratic exposure, meaning that the active risk it takes is overwhelmingly company-specific and of a kind that is very difficult to find elsewhere in the category. Over the past twelve months, the strategy has returned 21.6% against 18.4% for the MSCI Europe and is up 5.1% year to date to the end of April. (Source: eVestment in EUR; Performance Net as of end of April 2026)
Equally important is the consistency of the underlying philosophy. Since 2011, Zadig has applied the same styleneutral, conviction-driven approach regardless of market conditions. It has been tested through multiple cycles: the European sovereign debt crisis, the 2018 drawdown, the Covid shock and the inflation regime that followed; and the portfolio’s behaviour across those episodes reflects the discipline of the process rather than a fortunate alignment with any particular macro moment.
Why Memnon now
European equity markets have seen sharp and rapid style rotations in recent years between value and growth, between defensive and cyclical, between large and small caps. In this environment, the ability to remain styleneutral and build conviction stock by stock becomes a genuine source of differentiation. A portfolio that does not depend on any single factor staying in favour is well placed to capture opportunities across shifting regimes. At the same time, earnings growth expectations are beginning to converge across regions and market cap segments, broadening the opportunity set for selective, bottom-up investors.
In this context, the case for a genuinely active, diversified and style-neutral approach to European equity investing is stronger than it has been for some time. Memnon European Equity is not a bet on the direction of any factor, sector or macro theme. It is a portfolio of twenty to thirty carefully chosen companies, selected for their individual risk-adjusted return potential, constructed to behave independently of the market’s dominant narratives.
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