Fundamental Value

Turning market short‑termism into long‑term advantage

Our Fundamental Value capability, delivered by the award-winning Setanta team, is built on a simple belief: equity investing should be about owning real businesses for decades, not renting stocks for quarters.

In a world where markets are structurally short term and capital is increasingly concentrated in a narrow set of favoured names, this creates a persistent – and growing – inefficiency.

We seek to turn that inefficiency into long‑term advantage for our clients through conviction‑driven, fundamental value investing.

For more than 30 years, our dedicated team has applied the same long‑term value philosophy across global equity and multi‑asset portfolios.

We focus relentlessly on proven durable businesses: companies with strong cash generation, sticky customer relationships and durable competitive advantages, run by management teams that allocate capital prudently and with a clear focus on shareholder value.

Crucially, we only invest when quality and value converge, buying these businesses at a discount to our assessment of their intrinsic value and with a margin of safety.

What sets our Fundamental Value approach apart

  • Exploiting structural short‑termism

    Markets systematically misprice long‑duration cashflows, especially where the payoff sits beyond the current reporting cycle. We look through short‑term noise and market impatience to back underappreciated quality businesses that are being misjudged by the market today.

  • Quality and valuation – both, not either

    We start with quality: proven business models, strong balance sheets, resilient cashflows and governance we can trust.

    We then apply disciplined valuation work, including 20–30 year cashflow analysis and scenario testing, and will only invest when we can build a clear case for attractive long‑term returns with a meaningful margin of safety.

  • Deep, differentiated research – value is more than a number

    Our research is both quantitative and qualitative, with a deliberate emphasis on understanding how a business really makes its money and how sustainable that is. Without that understanding, valuation is just numbers on a page. We continually challenge our own theses, digging deeper the more a company appears to fit our proven durable business profile.

  • High‑conviction, risk‑aware portfolios

    We are highly selective: out of tens of thousands of listed companies globally, we own fewer than 150 across all our value funds. Portfolios are concentrated, high active share and built from the bottom up, with clear position limits and cash limits to maintain risk discipline.

    We deliberately avoid speculative business models and maintain valuation discipline even in popular market themes.

  • Proven downside protection through crises

    Protecting capital is as important to us as capturing upside. Our strategies have consistently demonstrated lower downside capture in major market sell‑offs, whilst still participating strongly in recoveries.

  • Continuity, experience and alignment

    Our team comprises 22 investment professionals with an average of 21 years’ industry experience and 11 years’ tenure at Setanta. Many are CFA charterholders or candidates, and lead portfolio managers have been running their strategies for 15–25+ years. This depth and continuity of conviction provides clients with a truly long‑term partner, not a strategy that changes with the latest market fashion.