Value was really underweight.

Based in Antwerp, Antoons is head of Portolani’s two-person selection team, the other being portfolio analyst Michiel Meekers. Portolani is an independent office for entrepreneurial families in Belgium. It currently is working with 40 families, monitoring €1.4bn.

Antoons told Selector he has been moving away from a heavy growth and quality bias to rebalance toward value in recent years. About three years ago, the firm’s strategic asset allocation was set to 33% exposure to quality, growth and value, but ‘in reality’, it had drifted to ‘45% quality, 30% growth, and the rest was value,’ he explained.

Now Portolani has ‘more value than growth in most portfolios’ and has even hired an additional value manager ‘because we wanted to be able to overweight value’.

Then at the end of 2025 there was a turn to look at small caps. ‘They were so cheap that we tried to increase that weight in most portfolios by up to 10%, even 15%,’ said Antoons. ‘That’s something we are discussing with the families. And then, of course, emerging markets. We see good opportunities there.’

Antoons picked three small cap managers, two European and one global, but is also in the process of adding another because one of the funds soft-closed.

‘That’s a little bit annoying if you really want to add a lot of money. We will keep the manager, of course, but we’re in a stage of adding another global small cap manager. We really liked the approach of the European managers,’ Antoons said, adding they ‘did not have a global sponsor’ and were regional managers, which normally he avoids, but in this case he selected them, nonetheless.

Closer to clients

Antoons is closer to clients at Portolani than in his previous role, as head of asset management at Banque Nagelmackers. There, he oversaw the investment process for the private banking and fund of funds businesses, and he established the firm’s value investment philosophy and its open architecture fund platform.

Changes are executed on an advisory basis meaning each decision needs to be agreed with clients before it happens. But, Antoons says Portolani is in the process of obtaining a licence to manage some families on a discretionary basis. Antoons explained about 90% – 95% of their client families’ money is invested, due to their longer term horizons.

‘They have a very long-term outlook. They don’t care about protection. There is, of course, cash. There’s a little bit of fixed income because most families are still working. There’s hardly any real estate because they have a lot of real estate themselves anyway,’ he said.

Naturally, families still want to know how well their portfolios line up with the big investment story of the day. A ‘big topic we discussed a lot last year’ was AI, Antoons confirmed. While the portfolios have active exposures to tech he is comfortable they are in ‘growth funds, mainly underweight AI’. Antoons confirmed Portolani does ‘worry about the valuation’ of AI stocks, but also sees ‘good value in the other styles’, adding that its overall portfolios contribute more money to global emerging markets vs the US anyway.

On the firm’s global approach to emerging markets, Antoons said: ‘We don’t do China, India and Latin America separately. It’s way too complicated.’ Instead, he has selected a ‘more quality-oriented global emerging market fund’ and another one that is ‘more value’. ‘They do different things. That’s why it makes sense to have two managers. And we do the allocation. ‘One is more on China. The other one is more on India. They have a different track record. But if you look at the earnings growth, it is amazing. And now with the weakening of the dollar, it really comes out.’