Equity process

Our equity investment process is designed to harness our best research ideas in the portfolios we build for our clients. By ensuring that our people work within this structure, we can consistently repeat our investment process with the aim of delivering our goal of consistently strong performance.

Idea generation
Built on a research framework that encourages teamwork, our process stimulates constructive debate and the exchange of investment ideas across SWIP's portfolio managers. An integrated proprietary research portal further promotes continuity and flow of information throughout the firm.

Fundamental Analysis
Our investment performance is based on fundamental in-house research that identifies an asset’s true value. All of our investment professionals carry out in-depth research to ascertain a security’s intrinsic worth. We look for stock pricing anomalies where the current stock price is trading below a level that fairly reflects the underlying company's long-term growth prospects. For equities, this involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative research looking over a ten-year horizon, encompassing a five-year historical analysis and a five-year forward projection. We believe this is a wider frame of reference than that adopted by our competitors, leading ultimately to better investment recommendations.

SWIP Proprietary Research Portal
Our researched stock list is accessed and updated via our proprietary internet-based investment portal. The Portal is a powerful tool in our portfolio-construction process as it affords us complete flexibility in the way we view and integrate our research. All our research, be it company data, written investment opinion or underlying portfolio weightings can be aggregated and customised to meet our fund management needs. What's more, this information is available to all our managers at any time.

Peer group vetting
We adopt a team based approach to investment decision-making, encouraging the free flow of ideas across asset classes and business areas. This, in turn, leads to an environment in which we can make informed investment decisions. To accommodate this, our innovative research portal provides a platform for our people to share their best ideas with their colleagues.

The results of our investment analysis are debated at regular stock review meetings where the investment case is challenged prior to the stock being rated as a buy, hold or sell. The recommendations assigned to each stock are combined with its target price and added to our researched stock list. The level of challenging within the team is reinforced with analysis run by our independent risk monitoring team. This leads to a very high conviction in the ratings, allowing only our best ideas to become part of the portfolio.

Portfolio Construction
Portfolio construction is the responsibility of the individual portfolio manager who is ultimately accountable for the investment decisions for every client portfolio he/she manages. The output from our research process is a buy/hold list of around 200 stocks deemed suitable for investment.