It is one of only three of AMG’s affiliates in which it has less than 50 per cent. The others are AQR and Blue Mountain. With AMG, ValueAct gets an Australian marketing presence, of which it has not started to avail itself. The local AMG office is run by Gregor Rennie. One of ValueAct’s more celebrated investments was in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, which, believe it or not, turned out to be a profitable decision, although not necessarily one Ubben and Hamel would like to repeat. Ubben invested in Martha Stewart’s celebrity company two days before she was indicted for insider trading. He doesn’t normally like retail but the Martha Stewart model was more about brand and marketing than inventory management. When she went to jail for two years, Ubben became chairman of the company, replaced the board and rode out the stock’s slide. On her release, with the stock price on the rise again, he sold the stake for a total gain of about two-and-a-half times the average investment.

“We want to be driving the bus, but we look for what we think are low-risk investments,” Ubben said. “When you have a CEO you can trust and you know the strategy, you can get a compound rate of return of 20 per cent a year.” The investment style – looking for recurring revenue streams – tends to skew the portfolio towards intellectual-property-based industries, such as software and technology, healthcare (including devices and pharmaceuticals), and applied technologies. “We like free cashflow, so we don’t own any banks or resources,” Ubben said. A recent punt is interesting. Ubben has put his toe in the water at the New York Times, where the CFO is Ubben’s former colleague at Martha Stewart Omnimedia, with a $70 million investment at $8 each share. The beleaguered stock is still in recovery but touched $10.80 on February 18. Watch that space.