Explora Capital Management (ECM) is the investment manager for Explora European Small & Mid Cap Fund Plc (The Fund), a variable capital open-ended company incorporated with limited liability in Ireland under the registration number 378368, and regulated by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority. ECN is today regulated by the Norwegian Banking, Insurance and Securities Commission. The Fund is also listed on the Irish Stock Exchange (Bloomberg code: EXESMCP ID).
Investment philosophy and style
European Small & Mid sized companies are under-researched and the trend is not likely to change for the better any time soon. Larger buy-side institutions are not prioritizing these companies as they are not perceived to be interesting from a trading volume and corporate finance perspective. This makes these companies “un-discovered” and, hence, we believe there exists an opportunity for generating superior returns from actively researching and investing in this segment. The investment manager will focus on researching and investing in companies with a market capitalization of between €50m to €2bn (€250m to €3bn on the short side due to liquidity constraints). The obvious caveat is that the process of investment identification is highly time consuming and the investment manager has therefore as an integral part of its research process decided that it needs to either have conference calls or even better face to face meetings with companies that are considered appropriate for a portfolio position. We like to think of ourselves as long-term investors and if companies continue to fulfill their objectives we will be invested for the very long term. Our portfolio will be concentrated and we will typically invest from 5% to 10% of net asset value in one single company depending on the level of confidence we have in the idea.
