There is a particular kind of confidence required to leave a secure, two-decade career on Wall Street and start a funds management business from scratch.
Cymer Capital founder and chief investment officer Samantha D’Amore has plenty of it.
Cymer is the Welsh word for “confluence” – the point where two rivers meet. It is a fitting choice for a woman from working-class Wales, the first in her family to finish high school and go to university.
A news story inspired her to apply to Harvard; financial aid and cleaning bathrooms covered the rest. “Capitalism is just brilliant at solving problems,” D’Amore says. “But most of institutional asset management wants to put you in a box.”
Her answer was to throw out the box altogether. Instead of starting with a sector or a region, she starts with the problem – ageing populations and care capacity, climate adaptation, digital complexity, food security, infrastructure resilience – then goes looking for the companies best placed to solve it, wherever they are listed.
“If you ask the question that way, and be actually really inclusive, it opens up a really interesting array of companies,” she says.
That creates durable, resilient growth that is underappreciated.”
The scale of the search is deliberately wide. Cymer tracks 14 persistent problems and more than 60 solutions addressing them, drawing from a universe of roughly 800 non-US companies worth more than $US10bn ($14bn). Fundamental research narrows that to a working universe of about 300 names, from which the fund holds just 30-45 of its highest-conviction ideas at any time.
Much of that opportunity, in D’Amore’s view, now sits outside the US. After years of extraordinary outperformance by US sharemarkets, many investors have become unintentionally overweight US stocks, just as the case for diversification is strengthening as the tech giants start to falter.
“Policy coherence globally is problematic, and maybe the US doesn’t have as strong a foothold on superb policy coherence relative to the rest of the world,” she says. “For me, just from a pure diversification perspective, this creates a fantastic opportunity in those international markets.”
Benchmarked against the MSCI ACWI ex-US index, Cymer’s active share runs in the high 80 per cent to low 90 per cent range. In plain terms, roughly 90 per cent of what she owns looks nothing like the index.
The fund runs inside tight guardrails: no leverage, no shorting, no derivatives, no currency hedging, and no more than 15 per cent in any single position.
It currently manages only D’Amore’s own capital and is not yet open to outside investors.
Her process reflects a scientific instinct, built on a physics degree.
The bulk of her time – roughly three-quarters – goes on assessing three to five-year fundamentals: competitive advantages, end markets, management execution and financial quality.
Valuation is treated as a timing tool rather than the thesis itself.
That rigour was sharpened by an unlikely early posting.
Just before the subprime crisis morphed into the global financial crisis in 2008, D’Amore joined an energy-focused long/short hedge fund just as global markets turned sharply.
“Stocks, from a valuation perspective, can go way higher and way lower than you think is rational,” she says. Underwriting the downside case first, she says, became a reflex – one she carried with her even after deciding long-only investing suits her best.
She points to Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce and fintech giant, as an example of that mindset at work. D’Amore admires the business but doesn’t own it, after an unexpected chief financial officer change in 2023 was followed by the founder stepping back in 2025. “Whenever you have a leadership transition, everybody should be allowed to transition off,” she says. “But when you have a change in the management team, you have to re-underwrite the thesis.”
In a portfolio as concentrated as Cymer’s, every holding has to earn its place, and uncertainty over who really owns the strategy was enough to keep her out.
More than a decade at Jennison Associates, covering industrials, materials and Asian infrastructure, gave D’Amore a “pattern library” of companies and cycles across geographies.
A later stint at sustainable investor Trillium Asset Management taught her that non-financial data can be a genuine fundamental signal, not just a values screen.
D’Amore is explicit that the strategy is thematically aligned but not an impact fund. Buying shares on the public market, she says, gives an investor no attribution to a company’s actions. Environmental, social and governance factors are “simply data points” that help explain the quality and durability of a company’s cash flow.
“This is a financial-returns-first product,” she says – one that uses a lens around persistent global problems to find durable growth, without claiming to change company behaviour simply by buying shares on the public market.
Cymer is also notable for being, in D’Amore’s words, “100 per cent woman-owned and founder-led” – a fact she states openly, given that fewer than 2 per cent of industry assets sit with female managers. But it’s less about identity than about a broader belief in diversity of thought.
“I don’t really care where you’re from or what you look like,” she says. “I’m more interested in how you think.”
That philosophy extends to hiring, where she looks for kindness and curiosity over finance degrees.
“I’m living proof you can learn anything on the job,” she says, adding that she wants people around her willing to tell her when she is wrong, not simply nod along.
Looking ahead, D’Amore sees two forces reshaping where the opportunities – and the risks – lie: shifting policy settings around the world, and the rapid, uneven rollout of artificial intelligence.
“I don’t think anyone really has the answers to which companies are being honest about that, and where the opportunities lie,” she says. “That creates a tremendous amount of opportunity, and also a tremendous amount of instability.”
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