Third Quarter - A Time for Travel and Getting Organized
A Note from Andrew
On the road in Q3: San Francisco, CoreWeave’s Fully Connected conference, Montana and Newport
2026 continues to be a record year for the Castle Hill Platform, with our affiliates raising more than $700 mln year to date. In what is historically a slow quarter, Q3 allocations ranged from $6 mln to $100 mln and included a long/short hedge fund focused on small- and micro-cap companies and a private credit co-investment in real estate and renewable energy.
I got on the road in Q3 - hosting our annual event in Newport, RI - this time spending a week in that amazing town, family vacation in Spain for the eclipse, an annual gathering of high school friends in Montana, and visiting family in the Pacific Northwest. These trips were followed by a work week in San Francisco attending the CoreWeave User Conference Fully Connected and hosting a launch event for a new affiliate group at the Ferry Building. Empty nesting has provided an opportunity to get on the road and I plan on using it to see the world and engage with colleagues and clients.
On the opportunity side, while choppy at times, Equity Beta continues to work…well… so we seek strategies that complement the prevalence of low-cost beta strategies in our LP client portfolios. This mission drives us to commodity trading managers, specialty finance strategies, and concentrated event-driven opportunities in complicated companies that are underfollowed and even less understood. At the beginning of the process, we ask ourselves a few questions.
Why does this opportunity exist?
Why has this manager earned the right to win?
If I can explain the reason simply over dinner with my still spry but octogenarian mother in Olympia, WA or with high school friends over beers in Montana…then we take another step forward in our process. “Being smarter” or “conducting deep research”…are insufficient differentiators. They are table stakes. We look for market inefficiencies and experienced teams that can navigate and extract value from those markets.
Staying on the topic of travel, the degree of spam and impersonal emails that I receive has become overwhelming. Real estate brokers inquiring if I am looking to move, individuals allegedly interested in buying my business, an abundance of cleaning companies for some weird reason…and the list goes on. If I am overwhelmed, I can’t imagine what LPs experience. Therefore, we’re encouraging our affiliates and clients to hit the road, have conversations and engage in face-to-face meetings wherever possible. This is the only way to learn more about areas of interest, confirm or challenge views and suggest ideas and opportunities that have relevance.
-Andrew
Adding Selectively to the Affiliate Platform
We continue to grow our affiliate presence, albeit on a highly targeted basis. At the time of writing, we have 45 affiliates on the Castle Hill Platform. This is a net gain of 1, with 3 additions and 2 removals. Our KPIs are not the number of reps or mandates. We measure quality of opportunity and sophistication of sales process and relationships with the investor community. That’s all that matters to us. Collaboration continues to be a core tenet of the firm -and collaboration is challenging over a certain number of individuals. However, we’re always interested in affiliates that bring specific areas of product knowledge or geographic coverage to the platform. We would welcome conversations with someone in the Midwest (While I am from Wisconsin, I can’t credibly cover from NYC) and even more on the West Coast.
We’re pleased to welcome Andrew Bilzin, Founder of Bilzin Partners, to the Castle Hill Affiliate Platform. Andrew led capital formation and investor relations for more than 15 years heading several high-profile hedge funds. He brings long-standing relationships with active allocators to liquid hedge fund strategies and further strengthens our East Coast presence.
What We’re Reading: Extreme Ownership
Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
Recommended by Shanna Cohen
After an especially busy season at Castle Hill, Andrew gave me a copy of Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. A leadership book by two Navy SEALs didn’t seem like an obvious fit for me, but it turned out to be one of the most practical I’ve read. Each chapter opens with a combat operation, draws out the leadership principle behind it, and then shows how that principle plays out in business.
The chapter that stuck with me is on leading up the chain of command. The idea is simple: if you aren’t getting what you need from the people above you, look first at what you can do differently, whether that’s clarifying, educating or making a better case. That translates directly to our work with managers. When a manager isn’t giving us what we need to represent them well, the first question is what we could do to close that gap.
It applies to investors, too. LPs make the final call, so our job is to make sure they have everything they need to make it. The best fundraisers I’ve worked with at Castle Hill anticipate investors’ questions before they’re asked and come prepared with the answers.
I’d recommend this book to anyone whose work depends on decisions they don’t control. And it’s been fun dropping Navy SEAL jargon into chats with Andrew and Geoff when they least expect it.
Tech Recs
Nobody has accused Castle Hill of being first movers in technology. Yes, we have a CRM etc but we’re cautious about introducing automation into a very qualitative, human-being-centered business and ecosystem. But we have started using a few tools that are great and wanted to share. As with all new technology, they’re incredibly easy to install and use. I have both on my phone and now no longer have to go full boomer, stop on the street, take out readers, and try to type a response. ;)
WisprFlow is an amazing tool that finally solves the limitations of using voice recognition. It learns diction, removes the ums, ers etc and provides a clean characterization of what you mean to say. And you can whisper into it as well.
Granola is a simple, fantastic note taker that I am using more and more as days are taken up by a range of different meetings and interactions.
Holiday Season is Around the Corner – Save the Date!
Save the Date- December 3, 2026 in your calendar for the annual Castle Hill Holiday Open House. We always look to add a new feature to make it memorable. We’re going to start a bit earlier with the hope of ending it a bit earlier as well…
Invites will go out next month.
See you on the road, and hopefully on December 3rd.
Andrew, Geoff and Shanna