The Billion Dollar Interview:
Cato Brahde, Managing Director of Tufton Oceanic (Isle of Man) Limited
Eurekahedge
April 2011
Cato Brahde is the Managing Director of Tufton Oceanic (Isle of Man) Limited. Mr Brahde heads up the Tufton group's equity fund management activities comprising Oceanic Hedge Fund and Oceanic Small Cap Fund.
Eurekahedge: Could you give us a brief rundown of how you joined Tufton and what you were doing prior to running the Oceanic Hedge Fund?
Cato Brahde: I am a naval architect by training. After getting my degree, I spent a couple of years in the Norwegian navy. After the navy, I joined Brown and Root, which was a subsidiary of Haliburton that did offshore oil and gas construction. This was back in the 70s when the North Sea was just opening up. At that point, I met Ted Kalborg and worked with him during the early 80s. Ted subsequently founded Tufton in 1985.
EH: What was Tufton like at the beginning?
Brahde: It was started as a boutique consultancy in shipping and energy. There was a lot of early work helping out of owners of ships and rigs who got into trouble at the time. The Swedish shipyards were going through a crisis in the late 80s because they had a lot of oil rigs being delivered, but because of the oil crisis collapse, some of the owners of those rigs did not survive. So the oil price in 1986 had major repercussions for the energy industry. By 1989, the Tufton shareholders decided to put a fund together to be run like an investment club. Ted knew I had an interest in stocks and shares so he asked me if I wanted to come and run the club. We called the company ISIC (International Shipping Investment Company). Andreas Vergottis, who is our current Head of Shipping Research, had just done a PhD in shipping economics. All our complex modelling, working on ship-by-ship models, was essentially Andreas's work from then.
