How We Invest

Investment Philosophy

Eilean Donan Castle

Stewart Capital Advisors, LLC (SCA) is a business perspective investor focusing on business valuation. Price is never the first focus. We use a fundamental bottom-up approach with a long-term perspective.

The Firm’s investment philosophy contains four tenants:

  1. Take what the market offers. SCA does not try to time the market, but instead listens to the market to determine what factors the Firm believes are driving performance. Markets will behave how they behave. It is incumbent upon the SCA investment team to anticipate these behaviors and to adapt accordingly.
  2. Don’t focus on short-term market forecasting. SCA believes it does not work. Rather than spend time making market predictions, SCA will analyze long-term market trends to attempt to understand the global forces that may be driving them. Then, SCA investment professionals seek companies they believe are likely to benefit from these trends.
  3. Understand the purchase. SCA combines the Firm’s in-house fundamental research with company management interviews in the attempt to understand a business and the factors that may contribute or may detract from its success. The SCA portfolio managers operate as a team, and each manager must understand each decision to include a company in or to exclude a company from the portfolio.
  4. Pay attention to price. After working to understand a business, SCA portfolio managers will calculate an intrinsic value for that company based on their assessments of quality, growth and value characteristics. SCA will not overpay based on the team’s assessment of the company’s value.