Ardevora Global Equity Fund

Ardevora Asset Management is an independent global equity boutique based in London running about £5.8 billion across long-only and 150/50 strategies. Ardevora Global Equity is a 150/50 fundamental bottom-up portfolio whose investment philosophy is focused on analysing the cognitive psychology of market participants (CEOs, buy & sell-sides, Ardevora PMs) with the aim of understanding what conditions encourage people to make mistakes - company management can be prone to overconfidence; sell-side analysts can react slowly to new information; and buy-side investors can be anxious at the wrong time - which in turn may create mispricing across securities. By filtering the investment universe combining inputs from these three groups, the team seeks to identify two types of longs and three types of shorts that are often subject to bias from analysts or investors. The long and short book are run independently (no pair trades). Within longs there are sensibly managed businesses that are subject to bias from analysts or investors. These stocks are clustered into two sub-categories: ‘benign growth’ (companies that can execute their growth strategy without taking too much risk, but analysts underestimate the duration of the growth) and ‘de-risked value’ (companies that are able to de-risk, but investors anxiety persist). The asset allocation between these two buckets is purely bottom-up driven (currently the split is about 50/50). On the short side there are three groups of stocks that can be considered (risky growth, ex-growth, and Value trap). The overall portfolio is highly diversified with over 250 positions at any one time. These are equally weighted within each region. The portfolio is also run regional neutral vs. the broader market index.