Paris-based quantitative asset management firm TOBAM's patented LBRTY strategy has surpassed $100m in AUM just six months after its launch, following an investment by a US-based endowment fund.

With the firm's research indicating that authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia pose a long-term risk to public equity investors due to their disregard for civil liberties, LBRTY aims to mitigate investors’ exposure to such regimes by systematically assessing risks.

The firm has identified an “autocracy risk driver”, which negatively impacts investors over time. It has also found that investors’ exposure to the autocracy risk driver is mostly indirect, through stocks that are listed in democratic countries but are in fact heavily reliant on authoritarian countries. This phenomenon was vividly illustrated when American and European companies lost tens of billions of dollars in Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, with public equity investors footing the bill.

Founded by Yves Choueifaty in 2005, TOBAM employs a maximum diversification approach to investment, which was first patent filed in 2006, to provide clients with "diversified core exposure, in equity and fixed income markets".