Luis Stuhlberger: Brazil’s Fundo Verde and the Manager Who Made 26,000%

Brazil’s best-known fund manager

Luis Stuhlberger was born in São Paulo in 1955. He trained as a civil engineer at the University of São Paulo, studied business at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and joined the brokerage Hedging-Griffo in the early 1980s, where he became known for trading gold during the economic crises of that decade. In 1997 he launched the Verde fund with R$1 million. Over the following quarter of a century it became the benchmark for Brazil’s “multimercado” funds, which can invest in shares, bonds, currencies and derivatives at home and abroad.

The 1999 devaluation call

The trade that made Verde famous came early. In the late 1990s Brazil held its currency, the real, at an artificially strong level. Stuhlberger concluded that it could not last, protected the fund against a fall in the real and bought shares in exporting companies that would benefit from a weaker currency. When Brazil let the real float in January 1999 and it lost a large part of its value, the fund’s investors gained heavily. “Eu vou pegar essa maxidesvalorização para os cotistas do fundo” — “I am going to capture this devaluation for the fund’s investors” — he later recalled saying.

Growth, Credit Suisse and independence

In 2006 Credit Suisse bought 51% of Hedging-Griffo and the fund became CSHG Verde. By 2008 it had around 10,000 clients and R$11 billion of assets, and its cumulative return since 1997 stood at 3,684%. In 2015 Stuhlberger and his team became independent again as Verde Asset Management. By 2024, according to Bloomberg, the fund had returned about 26,000% since launch — roughly 22% a year in reais and about 15% a year in dollars.

“Quem ganha, ganha. Quem perde, explica.” Those who win, win; those who lose, explain. — Verde’s letter to investors, 2014

The lean years

No record goes in a straight line. In 2021 Verde had only the second losing year in its history, and investors began to withdraw money. Over the five years to 2024, Bloomberg reported, the fund’s returns were roughly in line with the CDI, Brazil’s benchmark interest rate on very safe deposits, and assets at the firm fell from a peak of about R$55 billion in 2021 to about R$20 billion by September 2024. Stuhlberger took back direct control of the firm’s Brazilian equity funds and reorganised the team.

The CDI is the average rate at which Brazilian banks lend to each other overnight, and it closely follows the central bank’s Selic policy rate. Because Brazilian rates have long been high, simply earning the CDI has often meant double-digit returns, a demanding benchmark for any fund.

Part of the problem was structural. Brazil’s high interest rates mean that safe, tax-exempt alternatives often pay double-digit returns, which raises the bar for any fund that charges active-management fees. In a country where the risk-free rate is high, a manager has to beat it by a wide margin to justify the cost and risk.

What investors can learn from Stuhlberger

• Great records are built over decades, but they include long flat spells; investors who arrive after the best years often get the worst ones.
• A fund’s results should always be compared with what a safe alternative paid over the same period — in Brazil, the CDI.
• Fees matter more when safe returns are high: an active fund has to earn its costs before it adds anything.
• Macro bets can produce spectacular gains, and they can also be wrong for years.

For most savers, the practical takeaway is to understand the benchmark before buying any fund, and to be sceptical of past returns as a guide to future ones. This profile is general education, not investment advice.

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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