We believe company quality will ultimately drive share prices over time. Accordingly, we aim to create a portfolio of diversified, very high-quality companies. Our long-only strategies are grounded in fundamental, bottom-up research and a high-conviction investment process refined over decades. By staying true to this disciplined, long-term approach, we aim to deliver returns above the benchmark.

QARP Philosophy

We don’t follow traditional ‘growth’ or ‘value’ labels. Instead, we focus on high-quality companies with strong future prospects and disciplined valuation.

Our Quality at a Reasonable Price (QARP) approach is built on a methodical, research-driven process, selecting stocks with strong fundamentals. Our portfolio is unconstrained by benchmark weights, with investments based on merit across multiple factors including quality, valuation, and long-term outlook.

ESG considerations are integrated throughout, as we believe they contribute to better long-term investment outcomes.

Investment Universe

Our investment universe starts with 900 stocks, which are systematically narrowed through our idea generation quality score, fundamental quality assessment, and identification of mispriced quality opportunities — culminating in a portfolio constructed with an optimal blend across the quality spectrum.

We believe company quality will ultimately drive share prices over time, and as such we aim to identify leaders within their respective sectors. We define a ‘high quality company’ as one with an attractive combination of:

We employ a “bottom-up” stock selection approach to investing in global equities. We consider the MSCI Developed and Emerging Markets as our starting universe and methodically shrink our potential investment universe by applying strict quantitative criteria. Over time, we have found this approach has had the dual benefit of: eliminating poor quality companies from investment consideration, and focusing our research efforts on a smaller and higher quality universe of companies.

The investment team undertake extensive company research across the globe. Over the past 4 years, we have conducted over 1,500 company meetings. We have generated over 10,000 company research posts on our internal research database.

Bell Asset Management employs a robust and ongoing commitment towards integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues within our investment process. We employ a disciplined investment framework combined with stewardship and ESG-specific activities including ESG screening, ESG analysis, active engagement, and proxy voting with companies in all of our portfolios.

We believe that integrating ESG factors into our investment process will deliver superior long-term returns. As stewards of our clients’ capital, we believe active ownership and engagement is in the best interests of our investors.