T. Rowe Price US Smaller Companies Equity Q GBP

Investment Process

T Rowe Price is Baltimore based and has a team of 140 equity analysts, 40 of whom are focused on smaller companies. The team meets more than 1,000 companies each year. Smaller companies are much less well covered by other stock market professionals which means having a large, experienced in-house team of analysts is a distinct advantage. Companies must have market values between $100m to $9bn which gives them a pool of 2,500 stocks from which to build a portfolio of around 200 holdings. Sector weights are set by bottom–up stock selection though with an eye on keeping a broad sector diversification to limit risk/volatility. Both growth and value stocks are chosen. Position size is set by their confidence in the investment thesis and the quality of the company's business model. The risks of investing in small companies are somewhat offset by holding several companies in any given sector - for example in biotechnology where each company is reliant on the success (or otherwise) of a single drug, the manager will take positions in several such companies.