Fundsmith Sustainable Equity I

Investment Process

The investment process mirrors that of the Fundsmith Equity Fund in that manager Terry Smith looks to ‘buy good companies, don’t overpay and do nothing’. Smith has a bottom-up investment approach, with ideas being sourced through a combination of quantitative screening and other methods such as reading annual company reports. He looks to invest in high quality companies which can sustain a high return on capital, whose advantages are difficult to replicate, which do not require significant leverage to generate returns and have a high degree of certainty of growth from reinvestment of their cash flows. Smith also looks for businesses that are resilient to change, particularly technological innovation, and that have attractive valuations. This approach leads to an investment universe of around 70 ‘good’ companies, from which Smith uses negative exclusion screening to steer away from sectors such as aerospace and defence, metals & mining, casinos & gaming, gas and electric utilities, oil, gas and consumable fuels, brewers, distillers and vintners, pornography, and tobacco. To measure these negative impacts the team looks at a company’s reported numbers and its own ESG database. It also utilises the RepRisk Indicator which assesses the threat of reputational risk from ESG factors.