The Fund is managed by Greg Konieczny, Marcin Lewczuk and Kunal Desai, who designed the strategy at Mobius before finding a home to implement it properly at GIB. This is a genuinely differentiated approach to emerging markets as they focus on companies with quality characteristics, that trade on a discount to intrinsic value and to engage with them to improve their ESG credentials – which in turn will lead to superior share price performance. The team aim to work alongside owner-led companies (many of these reside in mid-cap land). They then engage with management to unlock hidden value within already high-quality businesses. This includes aiming to improve the company’s ESG score (e.g. improved reporting) and operational performance (e.g. reducing cost of capital, increasing free cashflow). This is a genuinely bottom-up approach, with the managers aiming to deliver outperformance via idiosyncratic risk.

The Evenlode Global Opportunities Fund is run by Chris Elliott and James Knoedler from the Evenlode HQ near Oxford. This fund, like all funds managed by the collegiate team at Evenlode, holds only high-quality businesses that they believe will grow at a steady pace over the long term. They take great care in trying to identify and hold businesses that can prosper in both good and bad economic conditions. This means they tend to avoid cyclical, capital-heavy businesses, and have a higher exposure to capital-light businesses with high levels of intangible intellectual property, and that also have high barriers to entry that make it hard for competitors to take their market share. They are growth focused, but pay attention to valuations, and will try to avoid egregiously over-valued stocks even if they are high quality.

Ranmore is an independent, boutique fund group. The Fund is managed by the founder, Sean Peche, who is an out-and-out value investor and a genuine stockpicker who pays no regard to the benchmark. The philosophy is to invest in “numbers, not narrative” and avoiding overvalued businesses. Instead, Sean and the team aim to own cash generative businesses that are fundamentally undervalued. There is a clear focus on not falling in love with companies (they hardly meet management) and avoiding the major danger of investing in value traps – with Sean noting he and the team will only invest in companies where “things are getting better, not worse”. The process is entirely bottom-up in nature based on Sean’s own proprietary screens, with the goal being to identify a target price based on normalised EPS figures and extrapolating what they believe the company will earn, typically over the next two-three years. If a stock trades at a significant discount to that target price, they will buy.

The Snyder US All-Cap Equity fund is run by the six-strong Snyder Capital Management team, based in San Francisco. They run a deep-research process, with the aim of investing in only a handful of stocks that meet the requirements of being both very high-quality businesses, and trading at usually attractive valuations. They have a long-term perspective, acting like owners of the businesses in their portfolio, rather than traders of shares. They are active managers that can buy companies of any size, meaning they are prepared for the fund to look very different to their market. They pay a lot of attention to the governance of the companies they research, which lends itself well to ESG considerations and, they believe, leads to higher shareholder returns over the longer term.

Stewart Investors is, in spirit at least, an investment boutique. Originally based in Edinburgh, it is a part of First Sentier Investors (formerly First State), which is in turn owned by Mitsubishi UFJ. Stewart Investors has a long history of governance-focused investing, best-known for its Asia Pacific franchise, which achieved great success under the guidance of Angus Tulloch. More recently, the team’s Sustainable Funds Group have been driving their business forward. They have a genuine focus on only investing in companies that are running sustainable, ethical business models, and were doing so for years before the current rush of ‘sustainable’ funds. They also retain the firm’s original emphasis on investing in a limited number of well-managed, growing companies that are respectful to their minority shareholders (as well as all other stakeholders). This European incarnation of that process is run by Lorna Logan and Rob Harley.

This fund is managed by Adam Rackley, founder of boutique investment firm Cape Wrath Capital. The fund is run under what might be classified as a deeper value philosophy, as it seeks to hold UK-listed companies that are trading at a significant discount to what Cape Wrath believe them to be worth. They are specifically looking for a subset of companies that fit that bill that also have a catalyst for a re-rating, and will also experience a change in narrative that will power that re-rating. The fund is concentrated by holdings, and pays no attention to the benchmark for investment purposes. It can invest across the whole market-cap spectrum, which in practice can mean it being exposed purely to small caps if that’s where the best opportunities are seen to be.