top of page

HIGH QUALITY. VALUATION ORIENTED 

Stocks represent operating businesses.  We focus on identifying durable assets, buying them at attractive valuations, and building portfolios that do not rely on macroeconomic judgements. 

​

Quality is a function of company profitability, balance sheet strength, resource allocation, competitive advantages, and more.  A portfolio of quality companies:

  • Compounds capital at high rates

  • Lowers bankruptcy risk

  • Tax efficient

​

Concentrate capital in the best investment prospects. Diversify across industries, sectors, business models, and geographies. 

​

We follow a disciplined, research intensive investment process using quantitative and qualitative methods to assess industry and business economics, management competence & quality and overall market dynamics before a stock makes ​it into the portfolio.  We are Sector and Benchmark agnostic, reacting only to the opportunity set offered to us at any given point in time.  We may opportunistically trade in lower quality businesses offering good risk reward if the markets offer them to us.  ​​

Resources: Overview

Quality

"Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down." Warren Buffett
 

Buy high quality business at the right price and hold that business until business fundamentals or expected forward returns degrade.  We look for understandable and predictable business with the following attributes:

  • High or improving returns on capital

  • Stable or growing competitive advantages

  • Cash generation and conversion  

  • Low capital intensity

  • Capital allocation discipline 

  • Culture of creating sustainable growth

  • Integrity
     

Great businesses are rarely available at discount prices; we may buy acceptable quality at reasonable prices.​

​

Resources: Quality

Risk & Safety

"All I want to know is where I am going to die, so I will never go there." Charlie Munger
 

Risk is the permanent impairment of capital.  Volatility is fluctuation in price.  

​

To minimize risk we avoid:

  • Excessive leverage

  • Illiquidity

  • High customer concentration 

  • Business models with high chance of disruption 

  • Poor accounting quality or accounting manipulation

  • Low insider ownership and misaligned management incentives

​

We utilize quantitative methods to screen a wide universe of businesses every week.  This screening process unemotionally eliminates companies that do not meet our standards. 

Resources: Risk & Safety
Resources: Valuation

Portfolio Construction

" A high quality asset can constitute a good or a bad buy, and a low quality asset can constitute a good or bad buy.  The tendency to objective merit for investment opportunity, and the failure to distinguish between good assets and good buys, gets most investors in trouble"  Howard Marks
 

We conservatively calculate a range of intrinsic values and internal rates of return (IRRs) for each investment candidate using a disciplined and fact-based process.  We patiently wait and will purchase a new stock only when a business achieves a hurdle rate specific to each portfolio.    

 

Resources: Portfolio
bottom of page