Mutoro Group Partners, LP
“To bear misfortune well when it comes, it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed place suggesting other associations and other motions than those which are making the present difficult to bear. A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal.” — Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930
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Annual % Change |
Compound % Change |
||||
|
MGP, LP (Gross) |
MGP, LP (Net) |
HFRI Fund Index |
MGP, LP (Gross) |
MGP, LP (Net) |
|
|
2015 |
(3.5%) |
(5.0%) |
(1.1%) |
(3.5%) |
(5.0%) |
|
2016 |
24.5% |
18.9% |
5.4% |
9.6% |
6.3% |
|
2017 |
(3.3%) |
(4.7%) |
8.6% |
5.1% |
2.5% |
|
2018 |
(0.9%) |
(2.4%) |
(4.7%) |
3.6% |
1.2% |
|
2019 |
30.0% |
23.9% |
10.4% |
8.4% |
5.4% |
|
2020 |
34.2% |
25.7% |
11.8% |
12.3% |
8.6% |
|
2021 |
8.5% |
5.5% |
10.2% |
11.8% |
8.1% |
|
2022 |
(44.8%) |
(45.7%) |
(4.3%) |
2.3% |
(0.8%) |
|
2023 |
21.6% |
19.9% |
8.1% |
4.3% |
1.3% |
|
2024 |
23.8% |
22.0% |
10.4% |
6.1% |
3.2% |
|
2025 |
5.6% |
4.0% |
12.7% |
6.1% |
3.3% |
|
Aggregate |
91.1% |
42.6% |
88.9% |
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|
Annualized |
6.1% |
3.3% |
6.0% |
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Dear Partner,
For the full year of 2025, our fund returned 5.6 percent gross and 4.0 percent net of fees. We ended the period with ownership stakes in 14 companies.
On a sticky note near my desk at home, I have a list of five words. They have no subject or header above them, but their meaning is clear to me. At least, I think it is. I should know because I wrote it. But I am unsure exactly when I did as it is undated. Whether that even matters is unclear to me because they seem to suggest a sentiment that I probably would agree with today or two decades prior or two decades hence. They are five words that represent the tangible things I think I need most daily, and what I have the most direct influence in my life to nurture: Sleep. Exercise. Nature. Nutrition. Therapy.
I have been practicing four of the five almost all my life, but the lattermost only recently. So, from those clues, I believe I wrote it sometime after the death of my older brother George in 2014 and when I first started going to therapy in 2019. It is a wonderful list. But it is incomplete. There is a sixth word I have yet to add to it but is just as important in the sort of preventative care and well-being and restoration that these words represent.
Longtime partners and readers of my writings, whether book reviews and essays or quarterly and annual letters, will know that Exercise and Nature have been frequent topics.
In my Full Year 2020 Letter, our single best year of results yet, in which the fund increased 34.2%, I shared my passion for cycling. I relayed how logging 4,000 miles a year grew out of physical therapy sessions that followed an Achilles tendon tear. It was an analogy for how we approach investing. I described how preparing for early morning rides the night before was similar to how I prepared our fund through using our cash balance as a sort of lever; it rises in frothy markets to amplify safety and declines in falling markets after purchases. And this has reinforced our ability to stomach short-term underperformance if our patience promised to be rewarded with long-term gains.
In my Full Year 2022 Letter, our single worst year of results yet, in which the fund declined 44.8%, I wrote of my love of hiking. Nurtured from numerous visits to my partner’s homeland of Norway, seeing a slice of the country’s more than ten thousand mountains, and climbing a sliver of them, I then drove to New York’s Catskills and Adirondacks and flew to Italy’s Dolomites. There my boots in each tasted trails of dust and gravel and granite. And my hiking testimonial explained how we kept investing through the 2022 market downturn without panic and with the benefit of additional investment capital into the portfolio.
I wrote at length in the Full Year 2024 Letter about the luxury goods e-commerce market and our position in Mytheresa. I encourage you to read the full letter if you have not already, but a brief excerpt might help re-orient us:
Down years happen, up years happen, and flat years too. But our goal is to ensure we focus on the long term of more tomorrows and that one year does not turn into a bad ending by fixating on the short term.
So, Exercise and Nature have been covered well in these pages. And though the healing benefits of exercise are profound, I found myself as a New York cyclist yelling “Ya motha’” at drivers and “Heads up” at jaywalkers with a regularity that was probably a tax on Therapy.
In 2025, another connection to Exercise and Nature reentered my life in a big way: running. I have for decades now been a runner, though my competitiveness and commitment ebbed and flowed as injury and recovery allowed. But the last two years it took on a more prominent role in my life as I logged over 1,000 miles in each. Runs around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in daylight and in darkness. Runs along the East River waterfront in all seasons, seeing the brackish water rough in fall and spring yet calm in summer, and in winter, car-sized chunks of frazil ice floated on its surface like giant white frozen lily pads.
In 2025 I started doing something I had not done in 12 years: I raced.
One comes to mind, that of Grete’s Great Gallop 10K in Central Park on Saturday, August 23, 2025. The original race premiered in 1995 to honor the memory and legacy of the great Norwegian runner Grete Waitz who won the New York City Marathon nine times and was a world record holder in the event.
The most important item of preparation pre-race touched on another word from my sticky note: Sleep. I ran several races last spring and summer, and all had in common interrupted and low amounts of slumber. I finally slept more than five hours before this one. An early bedtime at 9 P.M. helped. I awoke at 3 A.M., and with blurred eyes skimmed frantic group chat messages from my neighbors. Just hours earlier there had been some sort of violent altercation on the block. I had gratefully slept through this somehow. Looking out my window into the Brooklyn night, I saw the absence of anything that resembled conflict and mistook this to mean peace.
I then decided to walk my sixteen-year-old Border Collie Caspi and start my pre-race fueling, which focused on the Nutrition in my sticky: oatmeal, a banana, honey, and Gatorade. And then a nap to follow, if one can even do such a thing at 4 A.M., before fully rising for race day.
But as the saying goes, man plans and God laughs.
Walking Caspi at 4 A.M., we passed the last traces of a first responder presence. A lone cop car sat on the block with its headlights off and engine humming softly in the still dark early morning, red and blue lights atop the roof twirling in silence. And inside two officers bowed their heads as though in prayer to the faint white glows beaming from their phones. And as we continued to walk into the darkness, of special mention was a lone man who walked past with a speaker blaring the theme song from Friday the 13th, though the loud Spotify commercial breaks interrupting the music were probably a tax on his spooky intentions.
We returned to our building to find an unwelcome surprise. A neighbor, inebriated and back from a dance club, holding Popeye’s takeout and unable to enter. The building’s electric door system was down. Oh no. An Amazon deliveryman stuck outside too. Me, Caspi, drunk neighbor, delivery guy, delivery guy’s boxes growing late to their arrival time, and drunk neighbor’s Popeye’s growing cold in the late summer’s morning dark. Three Kings County kings and a canine queen bearing gifts. The whole time Caspi the calmest of the four of us, above it all and amused, on a sort of god-level, patiently enjoying this motley company of strangers, unfazed by the predicament, certain everything would work out just fine in the end. But we humans were not on the same plane. I had a race to prep for, others had food to eat and packages to drop off, yet we were locked outside, and everyone in the building asleep.
Several harried phone calls. No luck. More calls. No luck. Deliveryman left us, realizing this is not his emergency, packages safe in our keep. More calls. No luck. One last call. Eureka. Finally, someone answered, their phone left bedside by habit and unsilenced by accident, their sleep interruption our good fortune. We made it in. I showered, dressed, and in a rush set off for Central Park.
I arrived with little time to warm up, though grateful to have made it there.
This was my first-ever 10-kilometer race, despite having run the distance at least 132 times prior, according to my Apple Watch, and my first full Central Park loop in 12 years. I wanted to avoid blowing up on Harlem Hill, so I started conservatively. Maybe too much so. My plan was to run 7 minutes and 50 seconds per mile for the first four miles, then to squeeze it faster the last two. And that was about what I did, even with my watch being fickle versus the official distance markers. I finished with negative splits, bagged a meaningful personal record in the distance, and enjoyed the New York Road Runners’ Member Week festivities afterward.
I returned home safely and had time to decompress and nap, properly, and then repaid my neighbors, helping them navigate in and out of the building.
That day has significance for me. I understood this as I reflected on how a morning going so awry was rescued by neighbors kindly answering the night call. And how thousands of strangers gathered to celebrate the life of Grete Waitz. Especially come four months later in December when in the span of two weeks I was the recipient and witness to good news and bad news.
The good news first. By the end of the year, I had run enough races to qualify for the 2026 New York City Marathon. I would be lying if I said it has long been a goal of mine. I have, in fact, said the opposite, that I would never run a marathon and had no need to. But it became a goal out of habit. I came to accept that I might as well turn all this running and racing into an experience I had only witnessed from the sidelines, having happily been a spectator in the community of millions lining the course route for the past 12 marathons every first Sunday in November.
And now the bad news. My sweet Caspi passed away Saturday, December 13, 2025. It was something I had long expected, at least philosophically. I knew that adopting a seven-year-old street dog as she was in 2016 when we met, already a senior, meant I would have limited time with her. But the nearly ten years we had together were remarkable and beyond my wildest expectations, anchored by her years of great health even as she was growing old. My Azerbaijani street dog with a regal air turned Brooklynite was a near constant presence at my side from just after the fund started to today. I would be lying if I said it has been easy. It has, in fact, been the opposite. She was a member of my family, our first dog, and helped me recover after the unexpected passing of my older brother. Her consistent unconditional affection was a key pillar of Therapy.
After sharing a eulogy for Caspi I wrote, the outpouring of kind words and love from around the world I received from family and friends and neighbors was welcome and touching and helpful. I am so deeply thankful for it.
Taken all together, the help that morning getting into the building; joining the thousands in remembrance of someone who raced the people’s race and won it more than anyone else; thinking of what I have always loved about the New York City Marathon; and what Caspi gifted me as much as anything else, I saw what the sixth word on my sticky should be: Community.
And I am especially grateful to know, as much as I can tell, that the communities I am a part of are a positive presence on this planet. And this is in stark relief on days when I talk to friends around the country in confrontation with federal overreach and see the finest of neighbors. And then on other days read news from digital libraries on government sites showing the private files of abhorrent people who thought themselves mankind’s elite but were truly its worst.
I am reminded that not all communities are inherently good nor grow healthfully. And as much as we can, it is wise to be thoughtful and intentional about the communities we choose to enter and return to regularly, and how we participate in them. While all might seem to provide their members with preventative care and well-being and repair, some exact a tax so heavy on their members and non-members alike that no money or time or spirit can ever repay it. Others, however, and most we hope, thankfully, truly heal.
Sleep. Exercise. Nature. Nutrition. Therapy. Community.
*****
In my Full Year 2024 Letter as well as my Q3 2025 Letter, I wrote at length about the luxury goods e-commerce market and about our position in our fund’s largest holding, LuxExperience (née Mytheresa). It was 15.1% of the fund at the end of the year. The summary is as follows. The company successfully finalized its acquisition of its last standing direct rival YOOX Net-a-Porter and has emerged with a highly liquid balance sheet, no debt, and a clear path toward long-term profitability. Despite strong results and a recovering sector, the broader market deeply underappreciates LuxExperience. Yes, even after its shares rose more than 40% in the last week on the back of strong earnings and J.P. Morgan upgrading its price target for the stock to $14-$20, which is 40% to 100% higher than its current levels. This disconnect is mostly driven by its small market capitalization, still minimal analyst coverage, and a persistent narrative that luxury e-commerce is flawed. It is also possible a demographic mismatch between male-dominated hedge funds and the platform's female-focused customer base leaves the business widely misunderstood. Ultimately, the gap between the company's improving fundamentals and the market's lingering skepticism presents an investment opportunity for us. We began buying shares in 2021 and continued this past year.
The table below shows the composition of our portfolio at the end of the year.
Portfolio Holdings
Thank you for your partnership. I am available to speak with you and with anyone you know who might be interested in joining us.
Sincerely,
Godfrey M. Bakuli
Founder & Managing Partner