Álvaro Guzmán de Lázaro: The Contrarian Who Bet Azvalor on Mines and Oil

From auditor to value investor

Álvaro Guzmán de Lázaro studied business administration at ICADE, part of Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid, and is a CFA charterholder. He started in 1994 as an audit intern at Arthur Andersen, worked at Bankers Trust in Paris and in 1997 moved to Frankfurt as an equity analyst at Value Management & Research. After spells at Beta Capital and Banesto Bolsa, he joined Bestinver’s investment team in March 2003, working alongside Francisco García Paramés until 2014.

When Paramés left Bestinver in 2014, Guzmán de Lázaro and his colleague Fernando Bernad left too. In 2015 the two founded Azvalor Asset Management in Madrid, where Guzmán de Lázaro is chief executive and co-chief investment officer. Azvalor began buying shares for its funds in November 2015.

Buying what everyone else is selling

Azvalor’s method is classic value investing: study each company, estimate what it is worth and buy only at a large discount, without trying to forecast politics or the economy. What set Guzmán de Lázaro apart was where that method led him. In the second half of the 2010s, after a long slump in commodity prices, mining and energy shares were among the cheapest on the market, and Azvalor bought them in size.

In a 2018 interview with the Spanish newspaper Expansión, he called investing in mining companies at those prices “a historic opportunity”, arguing that commodity producers had been this cheap relative to the Dow Jones only twice in a century. He favoured low-cost producers with little debt and owners who looked after the business, and said what mattered was not when prices would rise but whether they would. He also admitted the obvious difficulty: most people preferred to own Google or Amazon, which went up every day.

• Low-cost producers: companies that can still make money when commodity prices are low.
• Strong balance sheets: little or no debt, so a long slump does not wipe out shareholders.
• Aligned owners: managers or families with their own money in the business.
• Patience: positions sized to survive years of being out of favour.

Five hard years

Being early in commodities is expensive. According to an analysis published on Finect, by the third quarter of 2020 Azvalor Internacional had lost about 7% since launch, an average of −1.45% a year, while its reference index, the MSCI Europe, had gained about 50%. Its worst fall from peak to trough was about 54%, against about 34% for the index. By then mining and energy made up nearly 80% of the shares in the fund, assets had fallen from about €1 billion in 2018 to about €600 million, and a management fee of 1.8% a year made the wait even more costly.

Guzmán de Lázaro’s record shows what contrarian investing really feels like: you can be right about value and still lose money for five years while everyone else gets richer.

The turn

Then the cycle turned. Commodity prices recovered after the pandemic and energy prices jumped in 2022, and Azvalor Internacional gained close to 50% that year, according to the Spanish consumer organisation OCU, which ranked it among the best funds of 2022. The fund kept its bet. At 30 June 2026 it managed €3,104.6 million for 24,480 investors, energy made up 47.6% of the portfolio and materials 16.2%, and its largest holdings included SLB (formerly Schlumberger), PrairieSky Royalty and Glencore. In the first half of 2026 it gained 15.1%.

Lessons for ordinary investors

Guzmán de Lázaro’s approach is not one most savers should copy directly. A fund with most of its money in a couple of sectors behaves very differently from a global index fund, and anyone who bought in 2018 and sold in 2020 lost money. What travels better is the discipline behind it: know why something is cheap, make sure the company can survive until the price recovers, and only take positions you can hold through years of looking wrong.

This profile is general education, not a recommendation to buy any fund. Concentrated funds can deliver results very different from the market for long periods, in both directions.

This article is educational and general in nature. It isn’t personalized investment, tax, or legal advice — always weigh your own circumstances, or talk to a licensed professional, before making financial decisions.

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