The investment strategy of the fund is built around sustainability, growth, quality and valuation. The fund is focused on nine sustainable investment themes; five environmental (cleaner energy, environmental services, resource efficiency, sustainable transport, and water management), and four social themes; (education, health, safety, and well-being). Individual stocks are selected through a ‘bottom-up’ stock-by-stock fundamental and rigorous research process.
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Sustainable growth
- The fund is focused exclusively on companies providing solutions to sustainability challenges;
- We add value through expert understanding of the sustainability themes, new technologies and business models as well as through individual stock selection based on superior insights into companies in our portfolio.
- Focusing on companies that provide solutions to critical environmental and social pressures confronting society creates an investment universe with superior growth prospects.
- From this universe we invest in sectors and themes with high growth that are typically under- appreciated by the broader market.
Quality
- High quality companies are more likely to capture growth opportunities, and we believe that a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) profile is an important and under-appreciated indicator of quality.
- Our research combines ESG with traditional financial analysis at every stage of a methodical process revealing important information about a company’s growth potential and risk profile.
- We also believe that engaging with companies to challenge them on a range of ESG issues, and analysing their responses, further adds to our knowledge and understanding of a company.
Valuation
- The culmination of our investment process is to determine whether a company is attractively valued, or what would represent an attractive entry point for a stock.
- We use a range of valuation techniques and metrics to judge what ‘attractively valued’ means.
- The fund style is best described as quality, sustainable “growth at the right price” (GARP).
- We build a bespoke global peer group of comparable companies against which to compare valuations.
- We also use an historical perspective to assess the range of valuations over a longer time period.