Polen International Equity

The team uses a bottom-up, fundamental research process that screens for businesses with durable competitive advantages, consistent earnings growth above 15 percent, high returns on capital, and clean balance sheets. Idea generation comes from quantitative screening, industry conferences, and the team's own global research travel. The concentrated portfolio of 20–30 stocks means each addition undergoes deep due diligence before a position is initiated.

Damon Ficklin and Rob Forker serve as co-portfolio managers and share responsibility for all investment decisions. They are supported by a centralized Polen research team, but the final buy and sell decisions for the international portfolio rest with Ficklin and Forker.

Turnover in the Polen International Equity strategy typically sits in the single digits, resulting in holding periods that often extend beyond a decade. The team invests with a multi-year time horizon and only sells when the original investment thesis breaks, a company's competitive position erodes, or a more attractive opportunity emerges elsewhere.

Polen runs a benchmark-agnostic, concentrated portfolio of 20–30 companies. Position sizes reflect conviction, not market-cap weight, and the strategy avoids the sector constraints and turnover patterns of index-tracking vehicles. This construction allows Polen to own smaller-cap, high-quality compounders that broad international indices often underweight.

The core International Equity strategy invests primarily in developed markets across Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada. Dedicated emerging-markets exposure sits in a separate vehicle following Polen's 2022 acquisition of Somerset Capital Management, a London-based emerging-markets specialist.