InvestNow News 11th Oct – Devon – Monthly Update – Sep 2019
Our Fundamental Process in Practice
At Devon our key focus when building investment portfolios for clients is fundamental research and a recent trip that we made to the US is an excel- lent example of how this works in practice. Over the course of two weeks, and across nine states, we met with a large number of different businesses, customers, competitors and market strategists. While we don’t invest directly into the US, a number of our portfolio companies have large operations in that market or have US-based competitors. Each meeting gave us the ability to engage with management teams to understand how their businesses are performing, what the risks are and where the opportunities lie.
Interestingly, although there are very clear economic risks associated with Trump’s position on trade tariffs, we were able to identify that the US consumer currently appears to be in reasonable shape. Given that personal consumption contributes almost 70% of US GDP, this observation is important and in not one of the meetings we attended were actual or impending eco- nomic weakness seen as a major concern …