Three men, seven billion euros

Not everyone can do that: In tranquil Aschaffenburg, friends set up an investment company – in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. They collect billions from savers. A certain stubbornness helps them in this.

SEntering the market with a new fund in the midst of a financial crisis sounds like a bad idea. The finance professionals gathered in Frankfurt, to whom friends Uwe Rathausky and Henrik Muhle wanted to make their idea palatable on a December day in 2008, saw things the same way. The audience interrupted them with heckling, the two still remember today, the mood was gloomy: a few months earlier, the investment bank Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt and had caused fear and terror in the financial world. “One of the listeners shouted: Better invest the money in canned food and cigarettes,” say Rathausky and Muhle.

Today the two economists can laugh about it. In the end, despite some doubts, things ended well. “Our advantage back then was that we had nothing to lose as a newcomer,” says Henrik Muhle. Her fearlessness has paid off. The friends, to whom former Goldman Sachs banker Marcus Hüttinger joined at the beginning of 2020 as the third member of the gang, have achieved something amazing: with their three-man team, they have risen to become a real force in the German financial business. Your most important fund – the Acatis Value Event Fund – now has a volume of more than seven billion euros. It is precisely the fund that people reacted to with irritated heckling back in 2008 when it was presented.