Core Characteristics
Top 7 Investment Disciplines
Process & Approach
High Conviction Stock Selection

Core Characteristics

A high conviction long-only all-caps portfolio of Asia ex-Japan listed equities
Fundamental, bottom-up stock selection, style-agnosticActively managed, unconstrained and benchmark unaware
Strict ESG guidelines
Founding members have partnered together in Asia for over 14 years
Strong track record investing in Asian equities

Top 7 Investment Disciplines

Be Rational

Work hard to avoid a checklist of biases gives a large advantage over untrained persons.

Be Diligent

Knowledge compounds. Over time hard work turns into a widening advantage.

Do What You Know

Key to increasing the probability of good decisions.

Be Patient

Let compounding do the work and avoid interrupting it unnecessarily.

Be Conservative

For a compounding series, anything times zero is zero. Avoiding large mistakes is the key to compounding.

Be Contrarian

A necessary although not sufficient condition for outperformance.

Use Common Sense

When it’s trite, it’s right.

Our deep-dive investment process is designed to exploit different inefficiencies in the market, while minimising the supply of our own.

We adopt a deep-dive multidisciplinary approach to investing that exploit inefficiencies caused by rigid industry and country categorizaton, market cap categorization and investment time-horizon constraints. For example, it is increasingly harder to decide whether an automotive company should be categorized in the IT sector or industrial sector. Our multidisciplinary approach aim to exploit inefficiencies at the boundaries of analyst and portfolio manager coverage.

We promote rational decision making through open idea discussion and seamless information sharing. We embrace a collaborative decision making process – we believe good communication is key to good idea formulation, and putting everything under the sun with a team of open-minded individuals is one of the best ways to mitigate psychological biases.

A high conviction stock selection passes the following tests:

Opportunity cost

A new idea entering the portfolio has to be better than the least attractive idea in the portfolio.

Hurdle rate

If an idea does not meet our minimum hurdle, we give it a pass. We dislike holding cash, but we dislike dumb ideas even more.

Certainty

We prefer high probability events. We believe making a string of highly certain decisions rather than individual high upside-potential decisions is the key to maximise the long run rate of compounding.

Margin of safety

The company must be trading at a large enough discount to intrinsic value to compensate for the vicissitudes of life and our errors in calculation.

Continuity of earnings

We prefer continuity in earnings over near-term visibility in earnings.