About Sarria
Sarria brings together experienced investment professionals, analysts, specialist restructuring expertise, technology and client insight around a single objective: own European high yield and special situations.
What guides our work
Three ideas shape how every credit is researched and presented.
Independent thinking
We form the view independently. The market helps us test it.
Deep ownership
One name. One owner. One coherent view across the market and over time. Our analysts stay close to a credit from first look to final position.
Principal's perspective
Analysis with a purpose. We don't write reports to hand them over.
Our story
Sarria began the way a lot of good ideas do: with a single stroke. There was no platform, no elaborate technology and no grand plan to reinvent credit research. There was an idea, a lot of experience and a spreadsheet.
- 2018
The spark
Sarria was born out of a single piece of work. A client needed help understanding the situation at Takko, the German discount retailer. The recommendation was simple: buy the bonds at 65 cents on the euro and sell them in the 90s. The client followed it and was happy with the result. More investors asked.
- The idea
Time for judgement, not groundwork
Most of any analyst’s work is the same from one fund to the next: the same news, the same data, the same documents, on the same names. It offers no differentiation and no competitive advantage. If we did that groundwork centrally, and properly, investors could spend their time on judgement and differentiate their books. Some of the most successful funds in Europe understood this more quickly.
- The early days
Research by email
Another client came along, and another. We sent research as Excel files and PDFs by email, and visited clients in their offices to talk through our ideas and investment theses. It was personal, direct and a little improvised. Quality sells, and investors wanted more.
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- Growing
A better way to deliver the work
Important work was getting buried in inboxes, so we built our own website: a home for the research. It was a practical step, not a grand technological ambition.
- 2020
A window into the thinking
When the pandemic moved meetings online, we realised our internal conversations were valuable in themselves. We began recording our investment discussions, so clients could hear us work through a credit, understand why we held a view and challenge our thinking.
- Expanding
The whole space, first to move
We moved from hunting single opportunities to following a wider universe of European high yield, distressed credit and special situations. Covering the whole space before a company falls into distress means that when it does, we already know the name, and we are first to move.
- Building
A platform built around how we would invest
By 2026, the database technology available could not capture our ambitions. So, with the help of AI, we built our own, around what matters to investors and how we would invest ourselves.
- Today
Credit intelligence you can aim
The result is not so much a database as a first ‘intelligencebase’: an engine our clients can drive. It works from Sarria’s own integrated forecast models, legal library and the analyst thinking behind each credit. Flex any assumption, in one name or many, and watch the model move before your eyes. It doesn’t replace the analyst’s judgement; it’s based on it. It’s got wings, and it’s like nothing else. We call it Rafael.
We have always believed that good research should stand up to scrutiny. Now, we can show more of the thinking behind it, too.
The people behind the research
Investment professionals, analysts, restructuring and legal expertise, technology and client insight, working as one team.
Meet the teamWant to understand how Sarria works?
Get in touch and we will show you how Sarria fits into your process.