Atom

Investment Style: Small-Caps

Atom is a boutique Australian small-cap specialist investment manager based in Sydney. The firm is 68.0 percent-owned by Sanlam International, a listed South African financial institution. The remaining equity is held evenly by the co-founders of the firm, Drew Wilson and David Shearwood.

Atom established an analytical research centre in Bangalore, which is now 100.0 percent-owned by Sanlam. This group has 10 analysts.

Atom's portfolios are designed to be style-neutral, although the portfolio is expected to be biased to stocks with market capitalisations smaller than that of the benchmark, and have potential tilts to quality and growth.

Atom constructs well-diversified portfolios with a long-term focus and a keen eye for environmental, social, and governance issues. The investment process is fundamentally-driven and bottom-up, and has three main stages. The first is quantitative screening on the basis of key financial criteria, based on the models built by the Bangalore team. The second stage is fundamental analysis, with the objective of rating the quality of a business model, management, and financial position, while company valuation is the third stage.

The key investment professionals are David Shearwood (Chief Investment Officer), Drew Wilson (Managing Director), Deepak Ramaraju (Head of Research), and Hendrik Pfaff (Head of International Investments – Sanlam).