SoftVest Advisors, LLC

SoftVest Advisors, LLC is a registered investment advisory firm based in San Antonio, Texas, operating at the intersection of family office capital management and institutional-quality investment advisory services. The firm is led by Managing Partners Daniel Strickberger and Steve Goel, who bring deep expertise in energy, natural resources, and value-oriented investment strategies. Filing with the SEC under CIK #0001803391, SoftVest Advisors has established a distinctive profile within the 13F filing universe through its pronounced emphasis on energy and commodities-linked equities — a differentiated positioning relative to the technology and healthcare-heavy allocations that characterize many comparable managers. The firm's Texas base reflects its strategic proximity to the U.S. energy sector's operational and financial epicenter. San Antonio, Houston, and the broader Texas corridor house a concentration of energy-focused investment firms, and SoftVest's geographic and sectoral alignment positions it within a network of deep domain knowledge and industry connectivity. The firm's advisory structure serves high-net-worth individuals and family office capital, combining the flexibility of a family office investment mandate with the regulatory framework and fiduciary standards of an SEC-registered RIA. Its 13F filings provide quarterly visibility into the firm's publicly traded equity holdings, documenting its evolving positioning across the energy and natural resources landscape.

SoftVest Advisors pursues a concentrated, value-oriented investment strategy with a pronounced emphasis on energy, natural resources, and commodities-linked equities. The firm's investment philosophy is rooted in contrarian, fundamentals-driven analysis that seeks to identify deeply undervalued opportunities within sectors that are frequently mispriced by the broader market — particularly in cyclical industries where sentiment extremes create asymmetric risk-reward dynamics. The 13F Portfolio Composition reveals a portfolio that is significantly overweight energy and natural resources relative to broad market benchmarks. Holdings typically span upstream oil and gas producers, midstream infrastructure companies, mining and metals equities, and related commodity-sensitive businesses. This sectoral concentration is a deliberate strategic choice rather than an incidental allocation outcome, reflecting the managing partners' conviction that energy and real asset equities offer compelling long-term value propositions, particularly in macroeconomic environments characterized by structural supply constraints, inflationary pressures, and underinvestment in commodity production capacity. The firm's approach can be characterized as high-conviction and concentrated. Rather than building broadly diversified portfolios, SoftVest tends to allocate meaningful capital to a select number of positions where the team has developed deep analytical conviction. This concentrated posture amplifies the potential for outsized risk-adjusted outcomes when the investment thesis plays out favorably, while also introducing heightened position-specific risk. The Sector Allocation History over multiple filing periods demonstrates remarkable consistency in the firm's energy and resources focus, underscoring a disciplined commitment to its circle of competence rather than style drift toward more fashionable sectors. SoftVest's contrarian orientation means that the firm has historically been willing to add exposure to energy equities during periods of sector-wide distress — precisely the moments when consensus sentiment is most negative and valuations are most compressed. This counter-cyclical capital deployment philosophy requires significant conviction and a long time horizon, both of which are supported by the firm's family office capital structure, which affords greater patience and flexibility than typical institutional mandates subject to quarterly performance pressure.

SoftVest Advisors, LLC occupies a distinctive niche within the 13F filing universe as a San Antonio-based, energy and natural resources-focused investment advisor operating with a family office capital structure. Under the leadership of Managing Partners Daniel Strickberger and Steve Goel, the firm has built a concentrated, contrarian portfolio centered on commodity-linked equities — a positioning that stands in sharp contrast to the growth-oriented, technology-heavy allocations that dominate many peer managers. The Annualized Return (CAGR) derived from replicating SoftVest's disclosed holdings captures the firm's capital trajectory through what has been a remarkably volatile period for energy markets. The post-2020 energy cycle in particular has been transformative for energy-focused managers, and the firm's 13F-derived compounding behavior through this period provides valuable insight into how concentrated contrarian positioning performs during major sector re-ratings. The Top 10 Holdings Concentration is an especially revealing metric for SoftVest, as the firm's concentrated approach means that a relatively small number of positions drive the majority of portfolio risk and return. Understanding the degree of single-name concentration, and how that concentration has evolved across filing periods, illuminates the firm's portfolio management discipline and position sizing methodology. The defining analytical question for SoftVest Advisors is: how does the firm's concentrated energy and natural resources portfolio navigate the transition between commodity super-cycle phases — specifically, can the contrarian approach sustain its compounding trajectory if energy markets enter an extended period of demand-side weakness driven by economic deceleration or accelerated energy transition dynamics, and how does the portfolio's risk-reward profile shift when the macro regime moves from inflationary tailwinds to disinflationary headwinds for real asset equities?

The risk characteristics of SoftVest Advisors' disclosed portfolio are dominated by its concentrated exposure to the energy and natural resources sectors. This sectoral concentration introduces a fundamentally different risk profile compared to diversified equity managers, with portfolio outcomes heavily influenced by commodity price cycles, geopolitical dynamics affecting energy markets, regulatory developments, and the capital expenditure decisions of energy producers. The Volatility Profile of SoftVest's disclosed holdings is expected to materially exceed that of broad equity benchmarks. Energy equities historically exhibit higher beta and greater cyclical volatility than the S&P 500, and a concentrated portfolio within this sector amplifies these dynamics further. The firm's portfolio is likely to demonstrate pronounced directional sensitivity to crude oil, natural gas, and broader commodity price movements, creating periods of both significant outperformance and meaningful underperformance relative to diversified indices. The Max Drawdown Depth is a particularly critical metric for evaluating SoftVest's approach. Energy sector drawdowns can be severe — the 2014–2016 oil price collapse and the 2020 pandemic-driven energy rout generated drawdowns exceeding 50% for many energy equities. A concentrated portfolio within this sector would have been fully exposed to these dislocations. However, the firm's contrarian orientation suggests that these drawdown periods may also represent the moments of greatest capital deployment, with subsequent recoveries potentially generating outsized compounding behavior for patient capital. The 2021–2022 energy sector rally, driven by supply-demand imbalances and inflationary tailwinds, exemplifies the type of recovery cycle that can reward contrarian positioning. Downside capture during broad market selloffs is an area of analytical complexity for SoftVest. While the firm's energy holdings may decline sharply during risk-off environments driven by demand destruction fears, they may exhibit resilience or even appreciation during inflationary selloffs where commodity prices remain supported. This regime-dependent downside behavior makes traditional single-factor risk metrics less informative than multi-scenario stress analysis.