Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López’s Three-Sector Rule
Family offices have a habit of collecting stakes the way some readers collect books, adding one more title until the shelf holds far more than anyone has time to open. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, who heads the O’Hara Administration investment vehicle, put a ceiling on that habit when interviewed in February 2022, and the ceiling comes with simple arithmetic.
Pick three sectors and put four companies in each. Then ask whether the person signing the checks can actually spend time inside all twelve. Alejandro Betancourt López treated that last question as the one that decides the plan, since a holding that never sees its backer gets little help from that backer.
How Alejandro Betancourt López States the Rule
His wording leaves little to interpret. Investors should diversify, he said, “but diversify within something that you can manage.” If the plan calls for three sectors with four companies apiece, he went on, “make sure that those four companies in each sector can take enough of your time to make and add value to those companies, because that’s something that is very important.”
Daily familiarity with each business sits at the center of the argument. Someone who loses track of what happens inside a holding, he warned, may end up “not adding the value that’s needed for those companies” to grow. Picking stocks and leaving them alone is a different exercise altogether. “But my style is to be active,” he said.
Being active, for Alejandro Betancourt, means rationing his calendar. He tries to back companies “where I can add value,” he explained, and to “choose enough space within my schedule to be involved with them.” The goal, in his words, is to “properly transmit those added values into the different companies I’m involved with.”
Twelve companies is a modest count next to the books that many funds carry, and the limit fits the portfolio his published résumé describes. That biography lists positions in eyewear, private-hire transport, padel software and banking, held through O’Hara Administration. He has played down the vehicle itself, calling it “just a holding company that holds investments.”
What Family Offices Are Doing Now
UBS surveyed 317 family offices for its Global Family Office Report 2025, a group with an average net worth of $2.7 billion. Respondents said private markets made up 21% of their portfolios in 2024 and planned to trim that share to 18%. Most of the pullback came from direct investments, the category in which an owner sits closest to company management.
Risk was on their minds as well, with 70% flagging a global trade war as a major concern. Benjamin Cavalli of UBS said that “family offices around the world are first and foremost pursuing a steady, long-term approach.”
Fewer direct deals leave more hours for each one, the same trade Alejandro Betancourt López described when he capped his list at a dozen companies. His family office is now putting more money into artificial intelligence and manufacturing for technology and robotics, he said in a later conversation, a category he called “high risk, high reward.”