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Invesco Global Focus
Invesco Global Focus is a high conviction, concentrated fund, which invests in structural growth winners. The philosophy behind the portfolio, which contains around 35 stocks, is to buy companies which are winning and then let them compound over time. Those with entrenched competitive advantages and attractive valuations are preferred.
Our opinion
The manager’s approach is refreshingly simple: understand the structural trends which are changing the world and then invest in the best companies which are benefitting from these trends. Randy combines this simple philosophy with detailed fundamental research and management meetings on individual stocks. He has a very high conviction both in his process and his portfolio. We like Randy’s wider range of life experiences, as well as his experience as a fund manager. Invesco Global Focus is stylistic and has a heavy growth bias and may be vulnerable to short term swings in market momentum. Randy has only been running this version of fund for a short time but has already got off to a blistering start.
Company description
Founded in 1969, Invesco forms part of Invesco Ltd, a global independent investment management company with more than 7000 employees in more than 25 countries. Its focus is on equities, but it also invests in fixed interest and other asset types. In October 2018, Invesco Perpetual dropped its Perpetual branding and is now simply known as Invesco.
Fund manager
Randall Dishmon has a wide range of experiences. He holds a B.S. in engineering from North Carolina State University, an M.S in engineering from the John Hopkins University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. He spent 7 years as a vice president with KCI technologies. He also spent two years as a management consultant. Randy was at Oppenheimer for over 20 years before it was recently acquired by Invesco.
Investment process
Randy has a no nonsense philosophy and investment process. His wide range of experiences working with different companies as an engineer and as a management consultant gives him an advantage when getting to the heart of what drives a business.
The strategy is simple but effective: identify a long term persistent trend, such as cloud computing, and find the best businesses in that area.
There are monumental shifts happening in the real world providing tremendous opportunities and risk. It is critical to invest on the right side of these trends. Current trends the fund considers are the rise of e-commerce, digital payments, cloud computing, network security software, life sciences tools, mobile technologies, social media and digital customer service.
Randy believes only three questions are worth asking which drives his fundamental research: Is this business ever worth owning? At what price? And is management working for shareholders?
Randy invests in companies for the long term and looks to benefit as growth compounds over time. A typical investment time horizon is 3-5 years. Randy and the team typically meet with the management of each company held in the portfolio once a year.
Risk
The fund is highly concentrated but carefully constructed to ensure good diversification across themes and sectors. It invests in structural winners and avoids cyclical stocks which are typically more vulnerable to a market sell off. Randy buys profitable companies, tries to make sure he doesn’t pay too much and that he is investing with the right people. The portfolio is then carefully balanced for risk and reward with higher weightings going to the best ideas.
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