JF Capital Partners

Investment Style: Growth bias

JF Capital Partners ('JFCP') is a 50/50 joint venture between JP Morgan Asset Management ('JPMAM') and Capital Partners Group ('CPG'), founded in December 1998. CPG is owned by the current employees of JFCP (96.60 percent) and an independent GPG-elected director of the board of JFCP (3.40 percent). All current staff having worked at JFCP for greater than 12 months own equity in GPG.

JFCP is a long-term fundamental investor. The firm's focus is on understanding the intrinsic value of a company and exploiting any difference between this value and the company's share price. JFCP's investment philosophy is based on the belief that financial markets are an 'emotional discount mechanism': that markets discount underlying fundamentals with either excessive euphoria or undue desperation. To exploit this market inefficiency, JFCP uses a research-driven, fundamental bottom-up process to gain an in-depth understanding of a company's underlying value and the risk associated with this value.

JFCP can be expected to maintain a growth-biased portfolio. This is a result of forecasting a company's longer-term cashflows and valuing its real growth options. The investment process is clearly focused on free cashflow growth and strategic growth options. Because of this, JFCP should have an inherent growth bias compared to other fund managers.

Simply stated, and using the manager’s own terminology, the investment process can be grouped into seven compartments. These are research insights, forecasting, and valuation, as well as investment return and risk, optimisation, qualitative overlay, and portfolio re-balancing.

The investment team is split into three sub-groups: Portfolio Construction team, Research team, and Investment Process. Key individuals are Chief Investment Officer Michael Fitzsimmons, Head of Research Pierre Prentice, and Senior Portfolio Manager Steven Semczysyzn.