Metropolis Capital – Stewardship of our investors’ capital
At the heart of our investment proposition, we look to protect and grow the value of our clients’ investment. Unlike many investment groups, we focus 100% of our efforts on a single, high conviction investment strategy. We invest in a portfolio of companies (15 to 25) which we know and understand well. We undertake deep fundamental research to build a picture of the quality characteristics of a business and its management; our typical hold period is > 5 years.
We do not invest on a relative basis, meaning we only own, or seek to own, companies that will increase the intrinsic value of our portfolio of holdings. As a result, we simply avoid many of the companies that would raise concern regarding governance or their approach to contentious social and environmental issues.
Our approach to Environment, Social & Governance (ESG) is centered on our belief that good businesses with strong and protected cashflows will be reconsidered by the stock markets over the medium / long-term to reflect these positive dynamics. We only invest in companies with a strong corporate governance and we seek management who understand their business and the threats they face, which include social & environmental threats.
Our belief is that the requirement for strong governance helps us to identify good investments that have the potential to protect and enhance shareholder returns. Our approach to ESG issues looks to identify factors that will have a material impact on the risk-reward trade-off of each investment we make. We then continuously monitor the companies we invest with to identify changes to our investment rationale. We engage with the companies we invest in and actively exercise our ability to vote on issues which could affect the returns from our investments.
Metropolis’s approach to integrating ESG factors into our investment process includes the following:
Proprietary in-depth analysis, carried out by the analysts in conjunction with the fund managers.
External ESG research to supplement our own research.
Active ownership by company engagement and proxy voting.