Nick Sleep, Qais Zakaria and the Nomad Way: How Two Investors Resisted Wall Street Compounded Billions

Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria built one of the most remarkable investment partnerships of their generation-and then walked away when its success made continuing more lucrative than ever.Nomad Investment Partnership began in 2001 with a broad search for neglected securities and apparent fifty-cent dollars. Over the next thirteen years, its founders gradually abandoned conventional bargain hunting for a more powerful idea: rare businesses could become increasingly valuable by sharing the benefits of scale with their customers.That realization led them to companies such as Costco and Amazon, to an increasingly concentrated portfolio, and to the difficult discipline of doing almost nothing. It also demanded an unusual kind of institution-one built around patient capital, aligned incentives and investors willing to remain when the strategy appeared to fail.In 2008, Nomad lost 45.3 percent. Its investors largely stayed. Sleep and Zakaria committed more of their own money, concentrated further and watched the partnership gain 71.5 percent the following year. By the end of 2013, Nomad had produced a cumulative return of 921.1 percent before fees, compared with 116.9 percent for the MSCI World Index.Then, at approximately forty-five years old, the partners closed the fund and returned the capital.Nick Sleep, Qais Zakaria and the Nomad Way tells how two little-known investors resisted the habits of professional finance, changed their understanding of value, survived a devastating test and learned that the most important investment decision may be knowing when to stop searching.