Emerald Asset Management has signed a purchase agreement to acquire the assets and integrate the management team of Elessar Investment Management, Inc.
The Elessar team will join Emerald subsidiary Emerald Advisers, Inc. upon completion of the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2015.
With over 30 years of industry experience, Rick Giesen founded Elessar Investment Management in 2005. Elessar has offered a high level of personalized service focused on both individual and institutional investors interested in value-oriented small and small-to-midcap domestic equity investments. Elessar’s team and investment philosophy are a natural fit with Emerald’s research-driven approach. Elessar is a boutique firm with passion and dedication to value investing, employing a research-based investment process that includes a rigorous and disciplined bottom-up fundamental research analysis conducted on each investment candidate. The Elessar team will remain based in Cleveland.
“We are excited to welcome the Elessar team and their clients to the Emerald family,” says Joseph E Besecker, chairman and CEO of Emerald Asset Management. “Rick Giesen and his team have demonstrated a strong commitment and a long track record of great success in value-focused small and smid-cap investing, and have done so with a passion for fundamental research that we share,” says Emerald Advisers president and chief investment officer Kenneth G Mertz II, CFA.
“We are proud of the record and reputation that Elessar has earned over the past nine years and look forward to bringing our team, philosophy and process to a wider audience through our merging with Emerald Advisers,” says Elessar president and founder Rick Giesen. Giesen is joining Emerald along with Elessar co-portfolio manager Ori Elan and compliance and operations specialist Mitch Krahe, Esq.
Elessar clients include institutional and individual investors, as well as shareholders in the Elessar Small-Cap Value Fund, a mutual fund founded in 2012. Pending shareholder approval, the Elessar Fund will become part of the Emerald Mutual Funds family.
Emerald is headquartered in Leola, Pennsylvania and also maintains offices in King of Prussia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Oceanside, California, and upon completion of the Elessar transaction, in Cleveland, Ohio.
