November 2025
In this fascinating session from our 2025 Investor Symposium, Managing Director of Investments Sasan Faiz and Ashley Marks, Co-Founder and Co-Managing Partner of Cordillera Investment Partners, pull back the curtain on some of the most unique, off-the-beaten-path investments in the alternative space.
Tune in if you're interested in…
Watch previous episodes here:
Ep. 163 The Realities of Selling Real Estate
Ep. 162 Why It Is Vital to Be a Healthy Skeptic
All right. Good afternoon everyone. I know the first session after lunch is very difficult, but this is one of the most interesting strategies that we have with Cordillera. We're going to talk about whiskey aging and marinas and, a couple other great ideas. So I'm Sasan Faiz, Managing Director of Investments at Morton Wealth. We're happy to have Ashley Marks, Co-founder and Co-managing Director at Cordillera Investment Partners.
Cordillera is an alternative asset manager headquartered in San Francisco. We've had over a decade long relationship with them and they invest in these, off the beaten path type investments, which which we like, the way they source these strategies and the way they do their due diligence. So, Ashley, before, starting Cordillera, you were the partner at McKenna Asset Management, and you were the portfolio manager for the McKenna Real Estate Fund.
And you have an MBA from Stanford. But more importantly, bachelor's degree from Michigan. So fellow Michigan grad, go blue. All right.
By the way, this is not scarlet.
So, your emphasis is on niche alternative investments. Can you maybe explain what that exactly is? And why did you guys think that was attractive to begin with?
Great. Well, thank you for having me, first of all, and thank you for being a great partner over the years. We think of niche alternatives, frankly, as alternatives. And we believe if you can invest in niche alternatives, you can unlock the original promise of what alternative investing was supposed to be and what it had been historically, which that really means is finding areas where institutional capital has not already competed away returns or bid up pricing, where you can get excess return per unit of risk and finding areas that are not correlated from a driver perspective with the rest of your portfolio.
If you can do that, you could drive returns up on your portfolio and have a much more stable portfolio and periods of contraction. And that's kind of the panacea of all investing and alternative investing. The issue with alternative investing today is that every institution, every pension fund, every endowment, every foundation invests in private equity, real estate, natural resources, hedge funds.
And so what used to be called alternative is no longer. And we would argue in a lot of those areas, returns have come down, correlations have come up. So we in a lot of ways think we're just going back to the basics of what I'll turn into investing was always intended to do. Find these niche areas, invest before the rest of the herd comes by.
Get outsized returns that are uncorrelated to the rest of your portfolio. And that's why we would argue you should have those in your portfolio.
All right. Great. So I think one thing we can be like about Cordillera is again non correlation to traditional asset classes of stocks and bonds, but also the individual investments are non correlated to each other. But there are broader themes that they may fall under. For example I was just at your conference in Lexington Kentucky and you were talking about this, specialty inventory financeAnd under that umbrella, for example, is whiskey aging. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that broad umbrella, what it covers, and then a little bit about the whiskey aging strategy.
Yeah. I think when people look at what we do, they say that's weird stuff. How do you even do it? And what you'll start to notice. And what I think Suzanne was referring to is that these things can start to be bucketed in various different areas, and Cordillera has always had a focus on certain areas. One of those areas is inventory finance, and the reason that we think that we can generate outsized returns that are uncorrelated is because we have patient capital that we can infuse into a supply chain that is oftentimes fragmented, where the other constituents within the supply chain are in the need of quick inventory and quick inventory turns, or don't have
access to patient or long term capital. So a good example of that. We've invested in whiskey, which I'll talk about briefly. We've invested in broadband spectrum, which again you can give me afterwards. And if you want to talk more about these, and we've also looked at things like case a cheese financing precious metals, precious metal lending and leasing financing, which would all fall under this category of inventory finance.
With regards to whiskey, we started investing in whiskey in 2018. So we're, you know, we're we're over six years of investing in the space almost. Actually almost, 7 or 8 years now. When we started investing in whiskey, there was a disruption in the industry. What had happened is that demand for brown spirits had been going down for for years and years.
As a result of that, distilling capacity had been taken out of the system. Then we saw right on the heels of that, the bourbon boom, which seems like someone has some whiskey right here. So maybe you know about the bourbon, but no, I was just kidding. It's iced tea. But but the point is, is starting in the early 2000, what we saw is that demand for brown spirits go up significantly.
That with combined with the fact that there was not enough supply, there was a big supply demand imbalance. And that's really areas that we like to kind of get into. In addition, it had been an industry that had been vertically integrated, but because the disruption prior to the 2000, we started to see that industry become very fragmented. What that allowed us to do is come in and provide our patient capital, our balance sheet capital, buy new fill whiskey, which is essentially moonshine.
We don't suggest you try to drink that. We take it. We age it for four years and then we sell it to craft brands at the prevailing rate on the on on a curve. That was for that reason, because the supply demand imbalance was at its steepest at have ever been historically. Long story short, we won't get into too many of the nuances that that was a very successful program for us.
We invested in about 18,000 different barrels. We've sold about a third, a third of those at a 2.7 times and gotten 100% of our capital back. So that's just an area of where we've been able to kind of marry our patient capital and inventory finance in a more niche. We're off the beaten path. Opportunity. So.
All right. Great. So I'm not a whiskey drinker, but now I think I know I can tell the difference between two year aged bourbon and six year aged bourbon. So much, much better.
Yes, indeed.
Let's talk about another area that you've been involved with. Boats, Marina integration. And, has been a really great strategy. And what attracted you to that, investment? And what is the exit strategy for that investment?
Yeah. You know, when you peel back the onion of boat marinas, it's not that dissimilar to real estate investing. And so when you look at what we what drew us to this was a confluence of factors. One, there was significant barriers to new supply. So I don't know if anyone here you do live closer to the coast than I do.
But if you were to try to build a new boat Marina, you would be facing about a seven year timeline. You'd be facing the EPA, you'd be you'd be facing a debt market where you cannot get any financing. And so it has been very, very challenging to build new supply about marinas as a result. It is a very it's like a supply constrained market.
On the demand side of the equation, you have the fact that people, at the end of the day need to park their boat somewhere. We are very concerned about the pro cyclicality, about marinas, but once you start studying the earnings of the boat marinas, it's incredibly sticky income. Despite whether or not people are boating, they need a place to park their boat.
Number one. Number two, if you don't pay your rent, the boat Marina can actually repossess your boat and use it as collateral. So at the end of the day, people pay their boat rental, their boat rentals. So what we found was a very interesting dynamic on the supply and demand with regards to the capital markets. There had not been institutional capital in the space.
We started investing in 2015 and cap rates, if anyone's familiar with cap rates, the inverse of a multiple were trading at north of 8%, even up to 10%. If you look at similar at the time. In 2015, if you looked at similar categories of real estate, multifamily, hotels, stores, they were trading well, well south of a 5%. So that delta between the 5% and the 8 to 10% was because it was quote unquote pre institutional.
And so we thought it was a really interesting place to get into. We always we always partner with an operator. This operator had been in the space historically. And so we essentially invested in operate to aggregate a strategy of 30 different marinas, increase earnings on the top line by putting institutional ownership, take out excess costs, by just having professional ownership and create a portfolio of these assets where you can get financing, because banks will look at a portfolio and say, listen, you don't have the idiosyncratic risks that you would have on one individual asset.
But since you have 30 different assets located across the country, we're going to give you financing the same thing with insurance. If you try to get insurance on one individual boat, Marina assets, very hard and very expensive, if you diversify it across a portfolio of assets, you can get much more attractive insurance. So in 2015, we dove into this opportunity.
We helped finance an operating company. Since then, we've grown that that company to about $3 billion. And hopefully we'll be looking to sell that sooner rather than later. So that's just a good area again, for looking for things that are pre institutional. They're pre institutional. Therefore you can get in at a good cost basis and find things that don't act like everything else.
In fact during the recession during periods of inflation over the past ten years we've been able to push earnings about 6%.
That's great. And I know that Blackstone just acquired the largest margin out there. So you think, your aggregated Marina assets are better quality. But this second largest right now in the US.
Yeah. So we're so safe. Harbor is, our, our competitor. We're SunTrust. You might have heard of them. They actually have a few assets in the area. The largest competitor just got bought by Blackstone at about a five cap, which is a tremendous, tremendous cap rate for that portfolio. So now we are looking at the opportunity.
We could either monetize it, we can, look to get an additional strategic capital or continue to grow it. This is one that, you know, as you know, we're a private equity fund. You all are investors that are invested in something for longer term and looking for appreciation. And so we are trying to figure out ways that we recognize that our clients do like longer term holds.
So this is an area that we might be moving into a CV, continuation vehicle so our clients can continue to hold it, but we're not going to have a lack of opportunities to monetize this one.
All right. Great. And I know recently sports related investments have become a big focus for Cordillera obviously. Then you talk about sports related investments. You can go by a small percentage of Dallas Cowboys. But I mean that's already very expensive.
So you guys are kind of looking either your, Gus, your partner was here last year. You talked about PTO, a professional triathlete organization. You also just invested in the North, in the Denver summit, which is a women's soccer league, the newly launched women's soccer league in Denver. Can you talk about how you came across that investment and why you think that's attractive?
That's great. Yeah. If you again, taking a step back because everything we do is under this kind of idea in theory that we're investors and things that are pre institutional and non correlated. Again just going back to why we're doing what we're trying to do. And so if you look through that lens sports has always been part of our purview.
There was a stat I was just reading that the correlations of the big four sports in the, in the US since 1960 is about 8.2, correlation to the broader market, which is a very low correlation. So I think probably all of us can kind of get behind the theory that we watch sports, we attend sports no matter what's happening in in the economy.
So I think one, it's uncorrelated. And then two, there's definitely a certain two pockets within sports that are less institutional. I would argue that Dallas Cowboys is not one of them. So how are we at Cordillera looking for those quote unquote pre institutional spaces. We have a thesis around three different areas within sports. First is emerging leagues and teams.
And if anyone heard Gus speak last year about PTO, that's the professional triathlon organization. That's where we provide a growth capital to a triathlon organization that's creating like a Grand Slam series of triathlons, both on the men's and women's sides going around to various cities across the country. And I would say that's think of that more as a growth capital versus venture, because that has been off the ground for about 5 to 6 years now.
So that's emerging sports and leagues. Then we have a thesis around women's, which I will come back to. And then finally we have a thesis about the picks and shovels supporting sports. We're seeing a lot of capital come into these spaces. We're seeing continued demand. And so there's a lot of ancillary businesses around sports that are going to benefit.
For instance, we're looking we're at a late stage of due diligence on a law firm in the UK that is sports only. What's interesting is you can't invest in law firms in the United States, except for in Arizona. Very niche. But you can't in the UK. And so we are under late stage negotiations of that law firm.
We think that'll really benefit again from this kind of rising. Our boats on the sports side, coming back to women's, we believe women's sports in general is at an inflection point. We've seen the demand for women's sports in the US, go up over 300% over just the past two years and is expected to reach about $2.5 billion in 2025.
This has really been driven by a combination of sponsorship, meteorites, deals as well as viewership, and that it's really that underlying demand that is making us interested in women's sports. And still there's still a lack of institutional capital within that space. In fact, I was at a conference and it was a conference on all different factors, and there was a sports panel, and the room was full of investors, and the men at the women's sports panel came on, which I was on.
Half the room got up and left, which was great because it means that there's still opportunity and we're just going to go ahead and sell to those people that left the room. But anyway, so the basis for our underlying investment thesis is this demand specific to your question on what we've invested in, we, just invested in the Denver expansion team, which is now formally called Denver Summit FC.
We're a 5% owner of that team. And on the board, the thesis behind that really is twofold. Number one, we believe that the NWSL will continue to grow at modest growth on a future basis, both from a commercial side and a valuation side. And I will talk to you more about that. And number two, we think Denver's team, both management and ownership team, is uniquely capable and uniquely positioned in order to compete at the top of the league table.
So I'll come back to both of those first on the NWSL. The NWSL, if you're not familiar, National Women's Soccer League was actually started in 2013. It was, the third try for women's soccer in the United States. It is currently has 16 teams, and it's going to 20 within the next few years. It is what we call a closed league, so it's not subject to relegation.
That's important. If anyone knows anything about English football or what's happens over in Europe, and that's a big, it's a big distinction on a risk metric. You cannot get relegated in the United States. And they've experienced incredible growth over the past 3 to 4 years. In fact, there was over 2 million people that went to various different games in the NWSL last year, and about 20 million people viewed it.
On linear television. This was about a five times increase from just two years prior. So we're seeing real growth there. And that's again underpinning a lot of our analysis. That said, it is still significantly under commercialized from multiple perspectives. Number one, all the dollars going to sports today, only 15% are going towards women's sports. From a media perspective, only 20% of the dollars are going to women's sports.
And you kind of say, okay, well, that might seem right. There has been multiple studies suggesting that the women fan, the person, not a woman watching, but the fan of women's athletics are a better consumer. And what I mean by that is they're 54% more able to have brand identification when it's been on a jersey, and they're 45% more likely to actually transact with that brand.
So at the end of the day, you want to be going after those consumers, yet they are still commercially underrepresented, from both a commercial, sponsorship and media perspective. So our thesis is those are going to continue to grow, even if the pie for media and pie for sponsorship might be decreasing. So those are the kind of underpinnings on more of a macro level.
Why Denver is a soccer town. Denver has three of the top 20 national team players. And which which suggests that it really has kind of a grass roots opposite operations within Denver. Number two, the ownership group, Rob cone, who is the controlling owner ourselves, and then Mellody Hobson, who's project level, chair, ex-chairman of Starbucks.
Husband or wife to George Lucas. Side note but she's also in the capital stack alongside us. And what that means is that we have real investors that are looking at ROI, and this is not a passion project for any of us. And that actually makes a significant difference, a significant difference. Finally, the city is behind it.
So both the mayor and the governor have both put out their flags saying that they will support the city. They will support it so much that they are going to be contributing land so we can build the stadium. So it is a combination of getting the right league, getting the right market and getting the right team, and that's our investment in Denver right now.
Thank you.
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