Michael Montford raises long-only PC3 Partners

Michael Montford, a seven-year veteran of Gabe Plotkin's investment firms, is raising money for PC3 Partners, a long-only equity portfolio spun out of Plotkin's family office, Tallwoods Capital. The fund has an absolute-return mandate.

Tallwoods will anchor the fund, Plotkin will chair its advisory board, and PC3 plans to begin trading in the first quarter of 2026, according to Institutional Investor.

The strategy has no external track record; Montford built it at Tallwoods and ran it with the family office's internal capital.

For allocators, the key open term is the hurdle rate: it is not pegged to a benchmark, and its level will be discussed with investors.

A preliminary foundation letter seen by Institutional Investor argues that long-short strategies have been hurt by heavy flows into passive and quantitative investing and by the rise of highly levered multimanagers. Those pressures have eroded short alphas and compressed net returns, the letter says. PC3 is designed to address those conditions.

"Our mindset is to outperform materially over the long term by doing consistently better over the short term," Montford said. The name stands for "protect" and "consistently compound capital," with the emphasis on protection. The strategy will buy high-quality businesses when prices dislocate and hold them.

Plotkin said Montford and his team had sharpened their long-only approach over three years at Tallwoods and called it "impressive to watch." On the hurdle, Montford said: "We believe in absolute hurdles. We don't believe in using a benchmark as a hurdle, which often encourages chasing hot sectors and creates a moving target."