Strategies
Active Fundamental Equity
Global Opportunity
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Global Opportunity
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Strategies
Active Fundamental Equity
Global Opportunity
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Global Opportunity
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Our investment philosophy is simple: We believe that by applying a price discipline to investments in high quality companies - strictly defined as those with competitive advantages and long-term growth that creates value - we can best capture opportunities and manage risk for clients.
The investment team believes that strong stock selection is derived from long-term investments purchased at a large discount to intrinsic value. We believe these long-term investments are best protected when they are sustainable with respect to disruption, financial strength and ESG externalities, and best enhanced when the underlying company has strong competitive advantages and growth that creates value.
Culture |
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The investment team’s culture is shaped by three core values that are cultivated an reinforced in many ways: curiosity, perspective and partnership. |
Reading Network |
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As part of Counterpoint Global, the Global Opportunity Team has access to a reading network that includes more than 150 investor and non-investor participants at Morgan Stanley. This allows the team to leverage the distributed knowledge of the firm and encourages cross-disciplinary thinking. Each week the team circulates articles, essays and thought pieces from a wide range of sources outside mainstream Wall Street in order to help enhance its knowledge and make informed investment decisions. |
Distinguishing Characteristics |
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– We incentivize our team in long-term alignment with clients – We value curiosity, perspective and partnership – We promote a creative work environment that adapts as the world evolves |
We follow a five-step investment process incorporating idea generation, quality assessment, valuation, risk management and portfolio construction: |
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| 1 | Idea generation
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comes from screening, contact networks, pattern recognition, disruptive change research and our extensive reading. Ideas are generated from an ongoing set of activities conducted individually and collaboratively. |
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| 2 | Quality Assessment
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When we formulate our investment thesis on the quality of a company, we ask three key questions to determine the sustainability of competitive advantage and how it can be monetized through growth: Is the company a disruptor or is it insulated from disruptive change? Does the company demonstrate financial strength with high returns on invested capital, high margins, strong cash conversion, low capital intensity and low leverage? Are there environmental or social externalities not borne by the company, or governance and accounting risks that may alter the investment thesis? Competitive advantages we favor include pricing power, differentiated competitive strategies, habitual services, consumable products, recurring revenue and limited threat from substitutes, rivals, suppliers, customers and regulators. Growth characteristics we seek include scalable business models that create value for happy customers, organic over acquisitive, secular over cyclical with a good mix between unit and pricing growth. |
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| 3 | Valuation
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focuses on the ratio of price to value derived from the key value drivers pricing, units, margin and multiple that determine the present value of free cash flow generation over a five-year time horizon. |
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| 4 | Risk Management
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We define risk in absolute terms: risk is losing money. We believe that idiosyncratic risk can be reduced by addressing what matters at the company level. We mitigate valuation risk by not paying a price that exceeds our estimate of value. We mitigate sustainability risk by analyzing the threat of disruption, financial strength and ESG externalities. We mitigate fundamentals risk of deteriorating competitive advantage and growth opportunities. Portfolio risks are mitigated by reducing correlated factor exposures with the support of monthly reports from portfolio attribution and risk teams. |
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| 5 | Portfolio Construction
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We seek to buy when the quality is high and the price is below value. We weight the portfolio based on low price to value, high certainty of value drivers and low correlation between ideas. |
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