Armina “Arms” Rosenberg is a living testament to the sum of grit, determination, and perseverance. From public housing in Sydney’s western suburbs to co-founding Australia’s most cutting-edge, AI-integrated Funds Management business, Minotaur Capital, hers is a life path that screams, not whispers, “high agency”.
Despite financial hardships and earlier challenges, Arms has channelled her disadvantages to excel academically and professionally. Her unconventional path into finance, coupled with sheer determination and intellect, has made her a role model for all women, particularly those aspiring to succeed in male-dominated industries.
Before starting Minotaur, Arms spent eight years as a sell-side research analyst at J.P. Morgan, leading the investment bank’s coverage of major Australian companies. This was followed by a Senior Investment Director role at Audant Investments and a high-profile position as Portfolio Manager for Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon Brookes’ family office Grok Ventures, where she leveraged her expertise in global equities (think: picking great companies on the stock exchange to invest in) and solidified her spot into corporate finance’s unofficial hall of fame as Australia’s ‘Punk Rock’ investor.
Arms no longer sports the pink hair that coined her this title, but she continues to apply hardcore rigour to her investment decisions with the added integration of artificial intelligence and the occasional rhinestone-embellished outfit.
Ella Hurley: Before we start – did I hear correctly that you had a baby and co-founded a business at the same time?!
Armina Rosenberg: Gosh, one was planned and one wasn’t. The Minotaur Capital Fund launched May 10th in 2024, and my youngest daughter came on August 2nd. And it was an even crazier time because we had been overweight to Japan (reader note – this means the fund or pool of money was over invested in Japan compared to the index), when the Japanese yen carry trade unwound.
And so, not only did my daughter arrive, but I was also trying really hard not to be a mother who’s on their phone straight away, looking at stocks. But just because the markets were volatile, and I was used to having downtime to have a look, it was a crazy period.
You’ve gone from starting your career as a sell side analyst at the world’s largest investment bank, to then moving to the buy side as an investor, and now you’ve transitioned fully into co-founder, portfolio manager, and investor, whilst also balancing motherhood. How have you evolved through your career journey and how do you see the intersections between motherhood and running your own business?
I think I’ve become a way better investor as things have progressed, and because the decisions are bigger, there’s a lot more riding on them. So, when you’re a sell side analyst, you make buy and sell recommendations for companies, but you don’t have to put your money where your mouth is.* It’s a really good way to cut your teeth and learn how to invest. And actually, a lot of people have the ambition of going from the sell side to the buy side, but if you’re not a good investor, then you can’t understand the buy side.
I always had that ambition. So, going to the buy side, putting my money where my mouth is, was very different. I’d say a lot of people thought that I wasn’t going to be great at that, less because they didn’t think I was an investor, and more because they felt like my skillset was more suited to the sell side and investment banking, because it’s focused on selling and building relationships with people. I do think the relationship side of things is very undervalued on the buy side, and I think building relationships makes you a better investor as well. And then going from the buy side and working for a family office is also a different sort of buy side too, because you don’t raise capital in a family office.
Grok Ventures had billions of dollars to invest, so I never went on that capital raising journey. Although I’ve always thought it would be something I’d enjoy (reader note – ‘capital raising’ means receiving money from external investors and investing it on their behalf). And honestly, the capital raising journey with my business, Minotaur, has been a really humbling thing. I think I was naively arrogant about my ability to raise capital and attract investment, which is probably a good thing, because I don’t know if I would have done it if I knew how hard it was.
And then, motherhood makes you ruthless with your time management. There were times before I was a mother when I could easily work on the weekends or easily work at night. I could rely on the fact that I would get a good night’s sleep. Those things are gone. I try not to do any work on the weekends anymore and make sure I’m very focused and present for my children.
I think it’s always somewhat hard balancing motherhood and running a business. I’ve got two young girls, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old. My toddler has a laptop toy and sometimes she’s like, “I’m Mummy, I’m always working.” And a little part of me dies… But then she’s also like, “but I’m really proud of Mummy, because Daddy says that I should be really proud of Mummy, because Mummy works really hard and she does a really good job.” So, I am grateful I can spend a lot of quality time with them both.
You always need people in your corner when starting a business, and I have observed firsthand how it can be difficult to raise capital – who have been your main supporters for Minotaur, how did you go about finding these people, and what observations have been realised through your networking opportunities?
From working in two different family offices, I’ve gotten to know a lot of key stakeholders in that world. They’ve been good supporters of mine. I actually run a networking group of women in family offices. When I joined the family office world, first with Audant Investments, I went to a few networking groups, and honestly, I was surprised that the crowds were not very diverse.
I’m obviously from an investment banking background, so I’m used to that, but I just thought it didn’t make sense because family offices are a really flexible environment. They are all about family values, so I would have assumed that there’d be more females in family offices. So, I decided to go looking for them and found a whole bunch. And basically, the reason why there were no females at these events is because they had similar experiences of rocking up and there were no women…!
So, I started my own networking group called The FOLD. We have two rules – Chatham House rules and no selling. And it’s interesting now because I’m not in the family office world anymore, but I still run that networking group, and they trust me to do that and have integrity about it.
Let’s talk more about your upbringing. You grew up in Western Sydney in public housing, raised by your single mother who emigrated from Indonesia. How has this shaped your perspective on personal values, career, and money?
Growing up without money teaches you the value of having money very quickly. I was in an environment that I never would want to go back to. Coming from my background, I think you end up valuing every single decision and making sure it’s the right decision to make, because things have larger consequences.
I think there’s this implicit assumption that people who come from lower socio-economic demographics, or are female or ethnic, just don’t fit into the finance world. And it’s modelled to us, right? You watch movies like Wall Street and Boiler Room, and they’re just classic examples of this. I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the finance world, but I never felt that was a disadvantage. I tried to always use it to my advantage.
And my Mum, she’s just such an incredible role model. She’s always said the best thing to do is reduce the differences on a subconscious level, build rapport with people, and then embrace your differences once you get to know them. I really feel you don’t get forgotten when you’re different, so that was a real advantage in my entire career.
Finance can be a lucrative industry to work in from a monetary perspective, especially in investment banking and investment roles. I often think about the concept of living in ‘survival mode’ and later discovering your passion once you’re out of the trenches and you feel safe and secure in supporting yourself. How did this play into your decision to pursue this career path, and how did you distinguish between your passion for the work itself balanced with the drive to escape your circumstances and make greater means?
Financial security was definitely a major part of my initial interest, and I would never challenge that. I do think it’s really important to be passionate about what you do. Luckily, I was naturally passionate about finance, which was helpful, but I also think that you can find a passion in finance no matter your background. And the reason I say that is I think a lot of people, particularly out in Western Sydney where I was raised, grow up thinking that a career in finance, and particularly investing, is about being good at numbers…. Which is actually not a huge part of what I do, to be completely honest with you. Excel does most of it for you, right? And AI is making it even easier to work out mathematical calculations.
I went to a selective high school, but I was not advanced by any stretch. I think the greater skill in investing is really getting to the heart of what makes a company tick, and there are several ways to skin that cat. For example, you can build relationships within the companies to find out how they’re doing and their revenue drivers, or you can just get really good at figuring out what the two or three key drivers of the company actually are.
But I truly think we over-index mathematical skills in an investment career. And when you boil it down, it’s pretty simple maths. Before I started Minotaur, I actually ended up having a career break, which I had never done before…. So, to your point around whether I pursued finance out of passion or need, I’d say it was first need, and then I developed passion. Because I had that stereotypical type A Asian female personality, which was set goal, achieve, set goal, achieve.
Those six months of career break were incredible, because I had the opportunity to sit down and figure out what I wanted to do next And I remember I had things like teaching English at high school, to being a full time Mum on the list, which I crossed off pretty quickly to be honest, to going back and studying history at university, to journalism. And funnily enough, I arrived back at my love for stock markets and listed equities.
Moving on to the present day and your current focus – tell us about Minotaur Capital. What does Minotaur do, what part does AI play, and where did the name come from?
Minotaur is a fund manager that specialises in AI-driven global equities. We generate investment returns by taking both long and short positions in companies that are listed on stock exchanges around the world. We use a technology-led approach to investing, which includes using AI to enhance idea generation and portfolio management through a tool we call ‘Taurient’. This AI system is designed to augment our decision-making rather than replace it.
Taurient is an AI powerhouse – it collects 35,000 news articles every week and then looks for companies that are undergoing a strategy change. This includes papers like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, and also local language newspapers like The Australian Financial Review equivalent in all markets across the world.
In terms of the name itself, both my co-founder, Thomas, and I really love Greek mythology, and the whole idea of heroes and making sure you don’t fall victim to hubris. I think there can be a lot of hubris in investment decisions. We wanted to remind ourselves of that. The Minotaur is at the centre of the maze, and we see the market as a maze that investors have to navigate.. The Minotaur is also half bull, half person, which symbolises the strength derived from combining human insights with powerful analytical systems. Having the bull as a positive connotation towards markets (i.e. “bull markets”) was another reason we liked it.
Are there any kind of anecdotes or examples you can share of decisions that Taurient has helped you make around your investment process?
One of the best examples is this pharmaceutical company in Japan. There was an article in Nikkei Business, which was written in Japanese, about this pharmaceutical company that was developing a lot of mid-sized molecules, which was the strategy change that we were focused on. I did a little bit more research into the company and found that they were developing an oral GLP-1, which is essentially a weight-loss medication. Obviously, we’ve all heard of Ozempic, which is an injectable, so you can’t really be scared of needles and take those sorts of drugs. So, an oral pill would open up the total addressable market for those looking to take GLP-1s.
More recently, they announced successful phase three results for the oral GLP-1, and their share price went up around 18%.
But I never would have found that stock if it weren’t for Taurient. I’m not reading a Japanese newspaper with my morning cup of coffee, right? So that’s a really powerful example of the idea generation part of it. And the weirdest thing about this company is that it’s a company worth a total of US$100 billion, but because it’s in Japan, no one knows about it.
Another example is our investment in a German defence company. We got interested in European defence back when JD Vance was making his address at the Munich security conference and pissed off the whole of Europe. So, we started doing research into the stocks that could be leveraged to that.
We used ChatGPT’s Deep Research function to generate a report on European defence, and it did that in 12 minutes. Normally, we would have asked one of our analysts to do research on that. They would have found a European defence initiation report from a broker like Morgan Stanley, which likely would have been written two years ago. Then they would have had to make sure that they incorporated recent context into that document, and that would potentially take them a month to do. Now, I’m generating those reports in 12 minutes…. So, we ended up taking a position in the company and it’s up 60% in the last two months.
The most interesting part is that we can see with Taurient when we’ve marked things as interesting or not interesting. And this company had come through Taurient three times from June last year onwards as an idea, and we kept rejecting it. So, if we had someone looking at it when Taurient told us to look at it, we would have made 200%.
You co-founded this business with Thomas Rice who also has extensive experience in funds management and technology-driven investing, what’s the dynamic between the two of you and how do you balance that? Are you completely different personalities and how has the relationship evolved over time?
I call him my perfect work husband. Seeing our co-founder relationship evolve has been one of the best parts of the Minotaur journey. I’ve known Thomas for over a decade, and we’ve always been friends. Thomas and I are very much aligned with how we think about investing and our investment philosophy and process, but we’re also super different in personality.
He is not a huge fan of presenting, or being in the limelight, doing interviews and podcasts, so I take more of that responsibility. He does all the coding and development. I would say I’m a bit more emotional, and I can sometimes get caught up when my stocks aren’t performing. It’s funny – he says he’s not actually any less emotional, he just wears it very differently to me. He seems calmer, but under the surface, he isn’t. But it doesn’t naturally show, and he calms me as a result.
We know finance, particularly investment roles, are traditionally highly male dominated areas. What legacy do you hope to leave behind as both a finance professional and a trailblazer for women in the industry?
I think the two dovetail. I’d say I am hugely passionate about getting more underrepresented people in finance. Honestly, it’s still very male-dominated… I think it’s really important to encourage females into investment roles because capital allocation is fundamentally important to how societies run.
If you have only men in those capital allocation decisions, then you naturally skew towards a world where it’s not a good place to be female, I think, or ethnic. All voices need to be heard. Also, for some reason, it’s a natural human tendency to think if there’s not someone that looks like me there, it’s not something that’s for me, which I think is a really broken way of looking at it. And, back to what we were talking about earlier, it’s people who don’t have any capital that know how to make some of the best decisions about capital allocation and money, because you’ve got to do it to the nth degree. So, my legacy is that I hope there are many more underrepresented people encouraged to enter the industry and take on investment roles.
We know you famously graced the pages of the AFR in 2019 as Australia’s ‘Punk Rock’ investor. How do you manage the careful balance of integrity and being true to yourself whilst also maintaining professionalism?
It’s something that I feel I have really struggled with my whole career, and I think a lot of young females do. I’d say there’s this real balance between likeability and credibility. I think there’s this natural inclination, particularly for me, to be likable. But for some reason, being bubbly and charismatic messes with your credibility.
I think the balance is you’ve just got to know your stuff ice cold, and unfortunately, you need to know your stuff better than others, which is what I’ve had to do. It’s probably best practice to always be informed about what you’re talking about, but I also do feel it’s way more important for underrepresented groups.
I personally feel this speaks volumes for our next question… Why do you think women have traditionally avoided investment roles and continue to do so?
I think women self-select out to begin with based on assumptions like, ‘Women don’t want to invest,’ or ‘Women aren’t aggressive enough for investing.’ I think it’s really circular. We grew up watching movies like Boiler Room or Wall Street, where the template is not women, and there’s no perception that women are allowed. I think it’s a generalisation to say that women are not aggressive enough, and I think there’s also an onus on companies to create environments where women feel comfortable to voice their opinion. Again, I don’t think that there’s enough that’s done on that. For example, who says meetings in a room with a round table is the right way to do things?
Some companies are having asynchronous meetings where someone will say what they feel about a topic, and other people will deliver videos on what they think, and then you can watch each person’s video, which means everyone has the same right to voice their opinion. And then you can watch them in your own time, so you don’t waste time in a conventional meeting. It’s a great way to challenge the status quo and make the environment more comfortable for people who might normally be afraid to speak up.
Thank you so much for your time, Arms. Let’s go get a drink!
*Reader note: Armina talked about her time working as both a sell-side and buy-side analyst. As a sell-side analyst, your job is providing research and delivering detailed reports to clients, which serve as ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ recommendations for investments they might choose, whereas as a buy-side analyst, your job is working for institutional investors like hedge funds, superannuation funds (think, AustralianSuper), or large corporates, and facilitating the final investment decision with the help of both sell side and your own independent research. Buy side analysis is proprietary, meaning their insights are kept within the firm to maintain a competitive edge.
*Editor’s note: The Missing Perspective‘s team attended Blackbird’s Sunrise conference courtesy of Blackbird Ventures.
