Bestinvest says
Argonaut is a boutique investment house that revolves largely around two fund managers, Barry Norris and Oliver Russ, who specialise in European equities. Russ and Norris work closely and tend to have a similar overarching macro-economic view. Both managers also manage their respective funds starting from this framework.
Our preference is for this fund as Norris is able to express a top down view in an unconstrained manner. Norris has a highly credible long term track record of mixing his stock ideas with his pragmatic top down approach to portfolio construction.
The fund is run on a flexible basis and is not constrained to any particular country or sector. In fact the style of Barry Norris means that the fund may have significant divergences from the benchmark, when he judges that it is appropriate. The fund can invest in a broad range of stocks without regard to market capitalisation.
The starting point for the fund is the overarching equity market conditions. The overall structure of the fund will reflect where Norris feels that the European economies are in the business and financial market cycle.
However stocks selected to fit into this framework are subject to close analysis and must have their individual merits. To aid this Argonaut use a quantitative screening system called JASON that ranks the universe of investigable stocks from 1 to 500 for each of the four metric screening factors: value, momentum, growth and quality.
Norris does not run the fund entirely on this basis. He will have long term ideas in the portfolio that are not changed to match the cycle, especially with regard to smaller companies.