In this episode of YS Up Governance and Boards Podcast, 3YS Owls Governance Consultants, Ainslie Cunningham and Deb Anderson interview Martin Pretty. Martin is the Founding Director & Investment Manager of Equitable Investors Pty Ltd. Equitable Investors is an independent investment manager focused on identifying listed investment opportunities and engaging constructively with the people behind them to maximise shareholder value. Its directors have over 50 years of combined professional experience in investment markets, focused on those market segments in which higher total returns are most likely to be found, being micro-to-mid cap listed companies, larger strategic opportunities, unlisted growth opportunities & mezzanine or alternative financing. We explore with Martin his entre into the business world through the lens of a journalist, Equitable Investors investment philosophy and their Dragonfly Fund, ESG reporting and investing and the world of finance, equities research and investments.

"So my time in both on the research side and working with Thorney Investments, I guess what I learned from working with the people that I worked with was that the best opportunities in the way I see the world, everyone's got a different view, but the way I see the world is when you invest in smaller businesses with a lot more upside in terms of the potential growth and value uplift for those businesses, you can get to know the businesses and get close to the people running those businesses, rather than sitting there at a screen and just reading ASX announcements and not really having the context of what's behind them and the quality of the people with real ambitions driving it.
And also, part of that philosophy is to get involved and where you can, assist the company, communicate with the company to ensure that they're focused on the things you believe they should be focused on, or they're aware of the opportunities that you can see. I believe that over time we've seen that that's paid off in spades in terms of being not necessarily an activist investor, not trying to oppose current regimes or break things apart, but to be involved and be constructive and try and collectively work for value maximization. So that's probably the philosophy behind Equitable Investors and our fund, Dragonfly Fund."
- Martin Pretty

Summary of episode
· Working as a journalist for the Australian Financial Review and Investorweb
· Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting and investing
· Microcaps
· Debt v Equity
· Capital raisings including convertible...