Investment approach
Vertium's investment process seeks to identify high-quality listed companies that are attractively priced
Investment Philosophy
Vertium believes that over the long term a company’s share price will reflect its fundamentals. In other words, markets are roughly efficient. However, in the short-term share prices and fundamentals can disconnect to create inefficiencies and mispriced opportunities. Specifically, over shorter time frames stock prices can overreact or underreact to changing fundamentals.
Investment Process
Vertium’s investment process is designed to identify companies where there is a disconnect between perceived quality and their value in the future. Essentially, the active investment approach is designed to:
Avoid high risk mispriced stocks:
• value traps (market underreaction to negative fundamentals), and
• expensive stocks (market overreaction to positive fundamentals)
Search for low risk mispriced stocks:
• bathwater babies (market overreaction to negative fundamentals)
• neglected orphans (market underreaction to positive fundamentals).
Vertium’s investment process also incorporates a conservative option strategy that generates additional income for the portfolio.
The combination of identifying mispriced companies with a highly focused income strategy results in a portfolio of 20-40 stocks.
Portfolio Construction
Vertium’s portfolio construction process has a strong focus on ensuring the right blend of stocks and option income to deliver its objectives across multiple dimensions (high yield, low volatility, and reasonable capital growth over time).
The blend of dimensions is important as too much emphasis on in high yield stocks may increase portfolio volatility, while over-exposure to low volatile stocks that act like cash will likely dampen returns.
Outcomes
Vertium’s distinctive approach delivers superior risk-adjusted returns relative to other high-income funds.
Which companies does the Fund invest in?
A 5-step hurdle process is applied to assess whether companies are legitimately providing environmental solutions, and whether they qualify for potential inclusion in the Fund:
Are they making a significant contribution to solving environmental problems
That they do not operate in harmful value chains
- unless that value chain is inevitable and the company’s product or service is mitigating its impact
- and the company’s product or service isn’t preventing the emergence of a better alternative
They do not have significant negative environmental externalities or Social & Governance shortcomings