Our Approach

Our targeted, disciplined investment approach leverages our decades of small-cap experience within a systematic process, which strives to deliver consistent and sustainable alpha on behalf of our clients.

"Stock picking generates alpha, portfolio construction amplifies alpha, risk management protects alpha"

Vincent Willyard, CIO

We seek to concentrate capital in the most attractive, high conviction small cap ideas globally with a strong focus on risk management and preservation of alpha.

Investment Philosophy

We are fundamental bottom-up investors that believe earnings growth drives stock prices. Investors tend to underestimate the magnitude and/or duration of the earnings growth driven by this change. Proper portfolio construction can amplify the returns from these opportunities, and diligent risk management can protect capital and preserve alpha.

Research Structure

  • Built to optimize targeted company research in the context of speed, flexibility and liquidity to maximize alpha and adjust risk in rapidly changing environments.
  • Close, purposeful collaboration allows us to make informed decisions with agility.
  • Targeted research focused on identifying positive change and its sustainability.
  • We are generalists across sectors and geographies, which allows us to invest opportunistically in the most dynamic areas of the market.
  • We avoid group think and delayed decision making by having one final decision maker for all investment decision – the lead portfolio manager.

Investment Process

  • Systematic. Disciplined. Repeatable.
  • We employ a fundamental bottom-up investment discipline that focuses on identifying opportunities where there exists positive, sustainable fundamental change.
  • A flexible and opportunistic approach to concentrate capital in our top ideas globally.
  • Intrinsically linked to our portfolio construction and risk management.
  • Concentrated portfolio construction with position sizing, country / sector weights, and a disciplined sell rule that are all deliberate and have evolved over time.

Risk management is accomplished in many ways:

  • Fundamental Research: continuously evaluate the growth opportunity measured against valuation risk.
  • Portfolio Construction: diversify at the equity, country, currency and sector level.
  • Quantitative tools and risk models: assess underlying risk exposures.
  • Macro Analysis: supplements our bottom-up research and helps us to determine the magnitude of our over/under weights in the portfolio.

Our investment process seeks to maximize sustainable alpha commensurate with appropriate risk.

Competitive Advantage

First and foremost, we believe our competitive advantage is the extensive experience and knowledge that we have acquired while managing global small cap equities over the past two decades. Successful investment results are a function of five equal elements that must be shaped by a team’s investment philosophy and optimized and incorporated into the investment ethos:

  • Organizational/team structure
  • Idea generation
  • Research
  • Portfolio construction
  • Risk management

If any one of these elements should falter, investment performance will suffer.

EGA’s competitive advantage comes down to the way that we have purposefully structured our firm to focus squarely on client alignment, individual accountability, close-knit team collaboration, and on delivering sustainable alpha for our clients.

Approach to ESG

Companies that are socially responsible, well governed, and environmentally conscious often increase their chance of long-term success. The interests of shareholders and stakeholders are not mutually exclusive. 

When analyzing a company’s ESG factors, we are especially interested in understanding how they are changing. This change may have a bigger impact on companies' probability of future success than static ESG data or scores.

To the extent that ESG factors may be material to a company’s business model, we seek to include these considerations into our investment process. By doing so, we seek to reduce risk and identify opportunities. We do not necessarily identify or analyze all material ESG factors for every investment, nor identify ESG factors for all investments. Over time, we expect to deepen and further integrate ESG analysis into our investment process as ESG frameworks evolve.