The Seven Canyons story begins with Spencer Stewart, who founded the firm in 2017. He came to it after five years at Grandeur Peak Global Advisors, where the emerging markets fund he managed ranked in the top percentile of its peers for the three years he ran it. He started out as an analyst at Wasatch Advisors, the firm his father, Sam Stewart, founded in 1975 and spent four decades building around patient, bottom-up, quality-focused investing. That discipline was not something Spencer picked up on the job. It was the family trade.
Growing up so close to one great small-cap firm and working inside another taught him something else. The best years at both came from a small group of investors doing the work themselves: meeting companies, building their own models, and answering for the results. Seven Canyons Advisors was built never to outgrow that. We hold three convictions. A small, highly collaborative team can produce exceptional results. Bloat, in assets or in people, breeds dysfunction. Performance comes first.
Today the investment team is Spencer Stewart, Andrey Kutuzov, Wesley Golby, Matthew Harris and Samuel Gilson. We are employee-owned, and we invest alongside the people who trust us with their capital.
We would rather stay small and excellent than grow large and become ordinary. Everyone else can have the peaks. We’ll take the canyons, where the water runs, and the value with it.