TINA and the ARTICO Team: Delivering Overperformance

The Artico team: Michael Brenneis, Tero Toivanen, Gabriel Herrera, Ulrich Niederer, Andreas Konrad, Stephan Meier

What makes ARTICO special?
Gabriel Herrera, Chief Executive Officer: Artico is different in two important aspects: First, we have “skin in the game”! This means we are significant co-investors in all our funds. When our funds outperform, we benefit, when they underperform our private wealth is directly affected. This ensures our interests are fully aligned with the interests of our investors. We therefore always act as true partners. Secondly, our investment approach is different: the companies we invest in have very positive fundamental attributes. These characteristics are the reason for our past outperformance over the last seven years. More important – these unique portfolio characteristics provide for a higher probability of future outperformance.

Companies with unique characteristics? Surely all managers seek that?
Stephan Meier, Head Investor Relations: Sure. But Artico’s portfolios have significantly different characteristics than those of our competitors. The companies in our portfolio grow their business much faster than others, have a twice as high profitability, a healthier balance sheet and are significantly lower valued by the stock market. In a nutshell, at ARTICO you get a diversified portfolio with very high growth and profitability exposure at a massive valuation discount. Investing in good companies has paid off in the past and should also do so in the future.

How do you identify those good companies?
Tero Toivanen, Chief Investment Officer: It is all based on thousands of hours of research. We have tested multiple criteria and methods to select the most promising companies. And we are constantly focusing our research to improve what we do. The best set of criteria is applied on the financial statements of over 30,000 companies, which are part of our database. This results in a fundamental score for each company. And then we simply buy the companies with the best score.

30,000 companies? That sounds like a lot of work…
Michel Brenneis, Head Portfolio Management: Yes, it is. And it would not be possible to do that research and scoring with even an army of analysts. Instead we are helped by TINA – our powerful proprietary system. TINA does all the work we would have to do manually on these 30,000 companies. She has a dedicated room and needs permanent air conditioning. She works 24 hours/7 days on scanning the global equity markets for good investment opportunities based on the criteria we have researched and defined. She’s the hardest working team member at Artico, so to speak!

How can you cope with such a complex business with just 6 partners?
Andreas Konrad, Chief Operating Officer: In fact it is much less complex than one would think: We have outsourced or automated most of the steps in our processes, so we can fully focus on our ongoing research activities, the regular trading processes and our control procedures. With only six partners, we have no administrative burden or internal bureaucracy and so 100% of our focus is on the performance of our funds.

Thank you very much! One last question: What does it mean to you to have been selected best quantitative equity asset manager in Switzerland?
Ulrich Niederer, Chairman: Our primary goal is to deliver outperformance to our investors. Winning this award is nevertheless the type of recognition one aspires to. When we founded ARTICO over seven years ago, we wanted to create something special. Most importantly, our objective has never been to become the biggest. Being regarded by our investors and the outside community as an excellent asset manager and delivering on outperformance is what really motivates us.