Polen Capital

CEO Stan Moss leads the firm, but investment authority is deliberately distributed. The Growth Equity and Credit platforms each house portfolio managers with autonomous research and decision-making responsibility for their respective strategies. The firm is employee-owned, which removes external shareholder pressure and aligns PM incentives directly with client outcomes rather than short-term revenue targets.

Polen's growth equity strategies typically hold roughly 20 to 30 names. This high-conviction approach is central to their philosophy — each position must survive multi-year due diligence on competitive advantage, returns on capital, and earnings visibility. Portfolio turnover is measured in years, not months, with the firm's original small-cap growth strategy running continuously since November 2000.

Polen distributes its strategies through multiple vehicle types: institutional separate accounts, US mutual funds (40 Act funds), UCITS funds for non-US investors, and a recently introduced suite of active ETFs. The investment process across these wrappers is the same, with the ETF launch representing a new access point rather than a strategy departure.

The credit business spans three areas — U.S. Opportunistic High Yield (strategy inception March 1998), Bank Loans (inception December 2013), and Collateralized Loan Obligations. The approach applies a fundamentally-driven, quality-tilted lens to the leveraged finance market, emphasizing capital preservation alongside yield capture.

Polen maintains offices in London, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi, alongside four US locations. The Global Emerging Markets Growth strategy invests in non-US developed and emerging market equities through the same concentrated, quality-growth framework. The Abu Dhabi office specifically signals an effort to deepen access to Middle Eastern sovereign and institutional pools of capital.

The employee-partner ownership structure gives decision-making latitude unusual for an asset manager of their scale. A Risk and Compliance Committee, plus experienced leadership committees, provide formal oversight without the distortion of a public parent or private equity sponsor. The corporate architecture reinforces the investment discipline — patient, long-duration capital allocation in the portfolio mirrors the firm's own capital and succession planning.

Polen runs three credit strategies: U.S. Opportunistic High Yield, a Bank Loan mandate, and a Collateralized Loan Obligation platform. The High Yield strategy has been operating since March 1998, making it as seasoned as their small-cap equity franchise, while the Bank Loan strategy launched in 2013 extends the credit offering into senior secured floating-rate instruments.