Kennox’s Heenan On Investing Where The Baby Is Thrown Out With The Bathwater [In-depth]

The 2025 Sohn London Conference has wrapped up, but we’re bringing you interviews with some of the interesting fund managers who spoke this year (See our in-depth interview with Muddy Waters' Carson Block). In an interview with Hedge Fund Alpha, Charles Heenan of Kennox Asset Management shared details on how they protect capital during down markets and lessons learned from some of his best and worst holdings.

Background on Charles Heenan

Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Heenan attended university and then spent a couple of years doing a variety of things, like tree planting. On his most prolific day, he planted an amazing 3,000 trees. Tree planting is a distinct industry in northern Canada.

Heenan was drawn into the financial industry because of the combination of financial analysis and subjective narrative. He enjoys being able to analyze a company’s numbers while gaining an understanding of it in the real world. Heenan then adds a bit more complexity by trying to understand the company’s future. Of course, no one knows what’s going to happen next, but he tries to project a future for the company based on the knowledge he’s gained about it.

Moving to the buy side

After working in Canada for a while, Heenan ended up moving to the buy side to work for an investment manager, shifting from analysis to taking control of decisions and having to live with those decisions over the longer term. Heenan said that’s what made sense to him, and he focused on the emerging markets in the late 1990s into the 2000s.

“What was fascinating about that was I arrived in my company on the Asia Pacific and emerging markets team in early 1997,” he added. “So that was at the end of a boom period for them. It's been a little rocky period in the early ‘90s, but Asia certainly was going through a real boom in late ‘97. By late ‘97, Thailand had fallen, you had the Asia crisis in ‘98, you had Russia problems, you had LTCM. So we went into a bear market period there.”

Heenan noted that managers have to persevere through both good and bad times.

Also see: Using Shorts To Fund Longs: Vintra’s Fruchter On How His Strategy Has Evolved [In-Depth Interview]

Moving to Edinburgh

He ended up in Edinburgh, Scotland nearly 30 years ago, a place he says is a great area to run money.

“There's a lot of boutique companies that do what we do, some bigger, some smaller, but a lot of them here in Edinburgh, so there's a long culture of investing, and there's a lot of individuals who have worked in different firms over the years,” Heenan said. “So investors here are very lucky to have interesting company, it’s a wonderful community.”