AGF U.S. Small-Mid Cap Equity Strategy

Overview

Strategy

Bottom-up growth investment style that looks at a company's revenue and profitability as well as earnings quality and growth potential.

Philosophy

The team's objective is to capture leading growth companies in every investment cycle. Every stock the team holds is a buy each day, or it is sold. The team uses an opportunistic bottom-up approach with front-end quantitative screens to identify high-quality, small-mid cap U.S. growth companies that can successfully generate sustainable above-average growth for revenues, earnings and cash flow.

Investment Process

Our investment process employs a fundamental, bottom-up and macro-consideration approach. Our universe contains 1,900+ U.S. companies with market capitalizations greater than US$500 million. First, quantitative screens narrow the investible universe to 350+ stocks. Next, qualitative screens continue to narrow the investible universe to 200+ stocks. A catalyst identification further reduces the universe to 100+ companies, singling out potential purchase candidates.

In order to determine the optimal growth candidates, in-depth analysis and due diligence is performed for each company. This step confirms that these companies exhibit the potential for sustained growth as well as continued innovation in their products and services.

The resulting portfolio consists of 25-40 companies that exhibit strong growth characteristics. The typical range for position weights is 1-8%. There will be representation in at least 8 of the 11 GICS sectors comprising the U.S. equity market, as represented by the S&P MidCap 400 Index.

Our team's utilization of a bottom-up investment process results in a high conviction portfolio of 25 -40 stocks that exhibit above-average growth characteristics.

Investment Process