WS Guinness European Equity Income Fund

The Fund is designed to provide investors with exposure to global equities through a high conviction, low turnover portfolio of consistently profitable dividend-paying companies.
 

Consistent high return on capital is a good indication of a company’s ability to pay healthy dividends. The Fund invests in companies that are unusually consistent in generating returns on capital above their cost of capital.

Our approach to dividend investing is to focus on companies that can sustainably grow their dividend into the future, rather than simply looking for companies with a high dividend yield.
 

The Fund typically invests in just 30 companies, with each company having an equal weighting. This provides a good balance between the benefits of diversification while also allowing each company to add meaningfully to performance. We don’t have a long tail of small positions and by definition we can never just ‘hug’ the benchmark index. Please see our white paper on this topic for more information.
 

We focus on ‘bottom-up’ stock selection rather than trying to make decisions based on an expected outlook for the world economy. We like to invest in good companies that have, in the short term, fallen out of favour, but that have previously shown an ability to weather most economic environments over time.
 

We prefer to invest over the long term. We also recognise the increased costs of trading in and out of companies unnecessarily. Typically we will hold a company in the portfolio for between 3 and 5 years.
 

Our team have developed an investment process that is clear, robust, transparent, and scalable. Their approach filters out much of the noise and hype that surrounds companies to focus on the true signals that drive company valuations. By performing their own company research and analysis, using their own proprietary modelling systems, the managers try to avoid some of the behavioural biases associated with being unduly influenced by market sentiment.