Beyond ‘Quality’: Katie Moran’s New Hedge Fund Focuses On Companies That Continually Delight Customers

The 2025 Sohn London conference has wrapped up, but we’re continuing our coverage by bringing you interviews with some of the most interesting and exciting speakers. We spoke with Katie Moran of CIE Partners, a new London-based hedge fund that’s launching in the new year.

In an interview, Moran shared the principles behind founding CIE Partners and lessons learned while working at Longview Partners.

Background on Katie Moran

Growing up in Devon, England in the southwestern part of the country, Moran was quite removed from London and didn’t know much about the world of finance. Initially, she studied law at Oxford University, graduating with a double first class honors before completing her training contract at Linklaters, with stints in London and Paris. Moran quickly discovered that she didn’t want to be a lawyer as she realized she was far more interested in understanding companies. As a result, she moved from law to investment banking to get closer to the companies and learn to value them.

“I started at Rothschild in 2008, so it is an understatement to say it was an interesting time to go into banking, particularly as I was working in mergers and acquisitions for banks and financial businesses,” Moran said. “… I increasingly started becoming much more interested in the businesses. Not so much doing a deal and then moving on but instead really understanding the business model and how it works. I Then moved into the asset management side of Rothschild and looked around for a fund to join. At the same time I was discovering and reading about great investors like  Warren Buffett and Seth Klarman and ultimately, I found Longview Partners.”

While Longview Partners. was managing $16 billion in assets at the time, the fund prefers to fly under the radar. Longview is a global equity fund with typically 30 to 35 long-only positions.

“I was a partner, the only female member of the investment team when I left,” Moran recalled. “I kind of grew up there both personally and professionally, and over time, I very much started to refine my own investment philosophy. I wanted to invest in a far more concentrated way, and I had evolved my own process for identifying the type of exceptional companies that I wanted to buy.”

An early, memorable stock

One of the earliest stocks Moran bought was during her time at Longview, when she researched and built a position in American Express.

Also see: CIE's Katie Moran Likes Stock Of This Dominant Brokerage

“I did a great deal of work to understand the business model and appreciate that whilst it looks like a financial, actually, it's one of the most powerful brands in the world. What stood out to me was that my understanding of the company was so different to the market's perception of it, including the rest of the Longview team,” Moran recalled. “… I remember it quite vividly because at the time, the picture on my computer screensaver was of my first child, my newborn son Ben, sitting wearing blue dungarees. One day I left my desk, and one of my great friends at Longview, another partner who has now left, edited the picture to put the American Express logo on top of Ben’s dungarees… because I'd been working on American Express so long. He thought it was very funny, as did I when I got back to my computer. But I didn’t leave the computer unlocked again!”