Stewardship

We consider ourselves stewards of our clients’ capital. Stewardship serves as a powerful philosophy that is focused on what really matters to our clients: generating long-term returns from investing in companies based on quality, value and sustainability.

Financial markets suffer from systemic problems and inefficiencies. Both asset owners and asset managers are well- placed to identify issues and implement change. Stewardship is as much about responsible ownership as a considered approach to selecting investments.

As long-term investors, we believe it is critical to take a holistic view of the underlying financial performance of an investment, the risk and the sustainability.

When we invest on behalf of our clients our core principles are:

• We are long-term in our approach to managing money. As active managers, we look for quality and value in businesses that will deliver absolute performance and create enduring value.
• We have a clear focus on direct investments in stocks and bonds, complemented by selected non-correlated income driven funds in certain strategies.
• We focus on underlying fundamentals, financial performance and sustainability of competitive advantage. We believe that environmental, social and governance factors also play a material role in determining sustainability over the long term.
• We seek out and support strong senior management teams with a track record of value creation but hold them to account where we have concerns.
• We aim to actively own, as opposed to trade, these companies. We have a truly long-term investment horizon withholding periods of five, ten, twenty years or often longer.
• We focus on absolute rather than relative performance as we believe this is what ultimately matters for our clients.
• We have a clear, simple and transparent approach that fully aligns us with our clients. We do not use hedging, leverage, short selling or derivatives as part of our core investment approach.