"We take a long-term view of our investments and we realize our ultimate success will come from our analysis of the underlying business."

Mark A. Meulenberg, CIO

Strategy

We think like business owners and our pragmatic approach to value investing brings this long-term perspective to each investment.

Our catalyst-driven, long-biased strategy combines a concentrated portfolio of high-quality businesses with a collection of special situations that exhibit highly favorable risk/reward characteristics.

  • We prefer to concentrate a substantial majority of the portfolio in a handful of our highest quality ideas.
  • As a complement to this, we will opportunistically choose a diverse set of capacity constrained investments that are extremely mispriced either due to structural inefficiencies, negative sentiment or neglect.
  • We will engage in shorting opportunistically mainly as a low-cost hedge in extreme market conditions.
  • Across all of our investments we seek to identify a catalyst or path that will lead to value realization.

Core Investments:

  • Understandable business
  • Essential product or service
  • High and increasing returns on capital
  • Generate substantial free cash flow
  • Recurring revenues
  • Management integrity

Special Situations:

  • Spin-offs, divestitures, and restructurings
  • Mergers, acquisitions, and refinancings
  • Microcaps
  • Capacity constrained

Hedges:

  • Options
  • ETFs

"The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right."

Benjamin Graham