Dave Iben and Alissa Corcoran, Kopernik’s co-CIOs, at the Kamoa Kakula Copper project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Every summer, Dave Iben takes his team at Kopernik Global Investors away from the sultry air of St. Petersburg, Florida. They’ve decamped to Belgrade, Budapest, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Lisbon, London, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. This summer, they’ll head back to South America, traveling to Rio de Janeiro.
“It’s important to get out there and see the world,” Iben says. “The stereotypes that we often have in America just aren’t right.”
He cites his personal love of travel as the foundation for what the $9.4 billion firm calls its “global immersion” program. Wanderlust similarly informs Iben’s global investment strategy: At the end of last year, its flagship Global All-Cap strategy’s top holdings were in companies based in South Africa, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Singapore, and Australia, as well as the U.S.
The firm is named after the Renaissance polymath who discovered that the world revolves around the sun rather than the earth: Mikolaj Kopernik, more commonly known as Nicolaus Copernicus. Kopernik, the firm states, “placed his hands-on analysis above the zeitgeist of the public at large.”
That’s a hint that Iben is an iconoclast, which in this day and age means a value investor — one following a strategy that has been out of favor in an era where big U.S. tech names have pushed the S&P 500 to record highs. And for some time, it’s the international markets where Iben has found value.
Take South Korea. “A year ago, almost 20 percent of our portfolio was in South Korea,” he says. Remarkably, Iben notes that the country is still classified as an emerging market on Wall Street. After spending two weeks of meetings there in 2024, Iben came away thinking that the people running businesses are sharp, the culture is education-driven, and the infrastructure is strong. “It just didn’t feel like an emerging market at all. It’s a strong economy.” (Kopernik has about 40 percent of its investments in what are classified as emerging markets, including South Korea.)
Other investors are finally starting to recognize that the world is bigger than the United States. Last year, as investors began to sour on the U.S., international markets outperformed after lagging for many years. Kopernik’s Global All-Cap mutual fund, whose shareholders are largely institutions, had a blowout year, gaining 65 percent. The MSCI All Country World Index grew by 22.87 percent, compared with the S&P 500’s 17.9 percent.
To protect Global All-Cap’s success, Kopernik decided to close the fund to new investors, with the firm preparing to offer a new global fund based on mid- to large-cap companies.
As it looks for beaten-down names, Kopernik has tended to focus on natural resources, whether in mining or energy, from precious metals to oil. “Over the past 20 years, resources have been undervalued,” Iben says. He prefers to check things out himself. “Rather than standing next to it, we like to see hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and mills and roads and infrastructure.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iben — who is in his 60s — even climbed down into a copper mine that was under development. Says Kenneth Morgan, Kopernik’s head of global trading, “Dave wanted to go see it because if it ever did go public, he wanted to understand what the conditions are there."
The far-flung adventures of Iben might seem out of character for a farm boy from Northern California who grew up on a five-acre property with cattle and horses. His dad was a veterinarian, and Iben figured he would become one too. Iben started his college career as an animal science major at the University of California at Davis. At the same time, he began playing poker and betting on football games. Doing “pretty well” at poker turned his head toward a career in the stock market.
The young man quickly started learning everything he could about markets, taking accounting, economics, and statistics classes. “I thought, Oh, this stuff’s all pretty fun,” Iben recalls.
After receiving an MBA from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, with a focus on accounting and investment finance, Iben heard that Farmers Insurance Group was looking for a securities analyst. He says he didn’t know what that was — but he was hired. “It was a good opportunity. Stocks had been dropping for 15 years. Nobody wanted [that job],” he says.
Farmers turned out to be an auspicious place for Iben to land out of university. As most insurance companies were unloading stocks, Farmers was buying. “My job was to come in and learn about companies and appraise them, figure out what they’re worth, and buy them for less than that,” Iben explains. After 44 years in the business, he says, “that’s still what I do.” In 14 years at Farmers, he also worked as a trader and a portfolio manager, and at one point was put in charge of bonds, ending up as the acting CIO.
Morgan, who worked on the trading desk at Jefferies in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, recalls meeting Iben at Farmers. Morgan’s first impression was that Iben was very tall. (He is 6'7".)
But Iben was also unusual in that “he listens more than he talks,” says Morgan.
Eager to learn everything about the business, Iben sat with Morgan while he was printing trades, which in the early ’80s was a manual endeavor. Eventually, Iben became Morgan’s client (then a friend, and now a colleague.) “Not every insurance company was doing what Farmers was doing, but when Dave was running the Farmers Insurance Group portfolio, they had the best performance or [were in the] top 5 percent every year he was there,” says Morgan.
Iben would buy stocks that were out of favor and sell when something traded at a premium. “He was a totally independent thinker and didn’t do what the crowd did,” Morgan notes.
That’s because following the crowd can be costly, as Iben likes to point out: “History shows that when you [bought] the largest market caps on earth, you didn’t do well and sometimes really bad.”
After Farmers, Iben joined a small firm that later became part of Nuveen’s NWQ Investment Management, where he co-founded Tradewinds Global Investors. The firm eventually spun off from NWQ, growing from a few hundred million dollars to $40 billion by the time Iben left. He then worked at Jeffrey Vinik’s hedge fund as head of the global value team for almost a year before Vinik decided to shut down the equities operation in 2012.
That gave Iben the opportunity to start something new. He launched Kopernik Global in 2013. The first few years, Iben admits, were “really tough.” Kopernik Global All-Cap fell 18.7 percent in 2014 and 12.4 percent in 2015 — years when oil stocks tanked. Since then, the returns have been volatile. Once last year’s performance is factored in, the fund has had higher net gains than the index since inception.
“People look at our portfolio, and we look nothing like the index,” Iben stresses. “We don’t even look like the value index.”
Investors like Mike Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, wonder if Kopernik is really a macro investor, given its big bets on resource stocks. Green isn’t knocking it. “I agree with their thesis and their articulation,” he says. Green, also known as a value investor, says he too is a macro investor, “so I actually would end up in many of the same places.”
Consider, for example, that three of Kopernik’s top-ten holdings are in gold and platinum mining stocks. “People always look at that, and they always say, That looks like you are top-down macro,” Iben says. “And my response is: We are 100 percent bottom-up.”
Adds Alissa Corcoran, Iben’s co-CIO: “I think it’s important to recognize that the market is very macro, and [investors] will think, ‘Oh, the economy’s going down, so therefore we can’t own oil. We can’t own these industrial metals.’ And so they sell off those commodities completely.”
She says Kopernik’s view is that “the best time to buy these commodities is when everybody’s worried about the economy. The way that we value them is on their own supply-and-demand fundamentals and not what the economy’s doing.” Kopernik considers, for example, What does the oil price have to be to bring on new supplies of oil?
Corcoran acknowledges that she often gets asked whether Kopernik really runs a macro strategy, but she insists that value remains a key tenet. “We’re looking at the company itself and looking at their balance sheet and looking at the individual assets and looking at the management team,” she says.
Before investing in Kopernik, James Courtman, the head of equities in the investment division at St. James Place in London, says he also thought the firm was primarily macro-driven. “Now we see this as something of a misconception about Kopernik,” he says, adding, “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize them as macro or deep value investors, but more as opportunistic and independent thinkers that place a strong emphasis on valuation.”
Courtman says his team looks for managers that target “less efficient” parts of the market. “We prefer to allocate when their strategy or opportunity set is out of favor,” he explains. Kopernik appeared to meet those criteria, he says, so St. James began investing in the fund in 2025 after following it for many years.
Courtman thinks periods of underperformance are inevitable for active strategies. “All else equal, volatility can provide opportunity for patient and long-term investors,” he says.
But, given the investments are often in thinly traded markets and companies, Kopernik watches volatility closely. The manager’s investment in emerging markets as well as some frontier markets forces it to look at how easily stocks could be sold without taking a huge hit. “We do a liquidity study every month,” says Morgan. “We analyze the liquidity of every single name in the portfolio. And as part of an initiation of a new company, we do a liquidity analysis and how big a position can we own before it’s declared illiquid. And there’s metrics to decide that.” The firm also keeps a healthy cash position, which right now is between 10 and 12 percent of the portfolio.
Kopernik often owns companies in “wildly unpopular” jurisdictions, which is why they are so attractively priced, Corcoran explains. “That is a hard thing to do. Owning China when China was uninvestable, owning Russia when Russia was uninvestable. And it’s why communicating with our clients is so important, so they understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Some 41 percent of Kopernik’s assets are in mutual funds, whose shareholders are mostly large institutions. Big banks and RIAs that are “quasi-institutional” are some of Kopernik’s biggest clients, says president Neda Yarich.
“Because we are so non–benchmark-driven and non–benchmark-correlated, we often have very, very little overlap in terms of the individual holdings with their other managers. And I think many times they’re looking for that,” she explains.
Other investors are in private funds, separate accounts, and UCITS, a European hedge fund–light vehicle that accounts for 27 percent of the assets. None of these have the typical hedge fund fees of 2 and 20. Though it may seem counterintuitive, Kopernik’s mutual funds have somewhat higher fees due to their regulatory costs.
Although today’s booming markets arguably are driven by passive investment, Iben believes this is “likely sowing the seeds for massive outperformance by active managers in the future.” That is why he has been buying U.K. asset management firms like Schroders at a huge discount. (Kopernik just had a big win in Schroders, which recently agreed to sell itself to Nuveen, pushing the stock up some 30 percent.) Kopernik also owns Ashmore Group and Jupiter Fund Management.
The firm also continues to argue that natural resources, which still mostly trade below 2017 levels, are a bargain.
Sometimes confirmation of one’s thesis comes in the strangest places. While in London for the summer, Iben visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he happened upon a display about platinum. It included a plaque that says platinum always sells at a premium to gold because it’s rarer.
“Throughout history, that’s been true,” he says. “But last spring, platinum would’ve had to triple to catch the price of gold. Now it only has to double to catch the price of gold.” Iben insists, “There is no reason” for that discount.
Despite a recent sell-off, gold has been on a tear in recent years, as central banks have loaded up on the precious metal. Moreover, investors have long viewed gold as protection from inflation and global turmoil — of which there has been plenty. After the run-up, Kopernik sold gold stocks in March and April as they soared, and bought platinum stocks, which were still cheap. “Often we’re way too early,” he says. But platinum stocks quickly took off. Now some of the firm’s top holdings are South African platinum miners.
Iben is keen on South America, with its vast resources. It’s one reason the team is going to Brazil this summer.
Another is that the Kopernik founder can’t seem to stay too long in his St. Petersburg office overlooking the Tampa Bay. He doesn’t travel just during the global immersion summers, when he typically stays ten weeks in a country. He travels other times of the year, too, leading Morgan to joke that he keeps a map “to figure where in the world is Dave.”
To that point, late last year Iben traveled a portion of the historic Silk Road.
“The Silk Road was the main passage between Asia and Europe, and everyone along the way got rich,” says Iben, who had read a book about Marco Polo’s journey there and had an itch to experience a part of it. He started the trip at an investment conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and went on to visit the famous Uzbek cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.
Iben says he was surprised by Uzbekistan, which last year developed a national fund, run by Franklin Templeton, to privatize 18 of its major state-owned companies. The country has twice as many people as Kazakhstan, which Iben had previously visited and where Kopernik has a couple of investments. Uzbekistan has “a booming economy and bigger airlines and banks” than Kazakhstan, he notes.
“We do find that getting off the beaten path, you can find things that others are missing,” Iben says. “It’s a big world.”
