Mr. Stewardson: For an overview, as I think you may know, we started our firm at the tail end of 1993 as growth managers in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is traditionally a "value town" so there weren't really that many growth managers around here back then. Al Besse, Stephen Lee, and I comprise the growth team and our assets are just under $1.6 billion now. We manage two growth portfolios here at Logan Capital: "Logan Large Cap Growth" with a market cap of $5 billion and "Logan Growth" which has a market cap of $1 billion and above. Both strategies employ similar research tools and we'll get into all of those. During the last 16 years as a firm, we've also employed others who have brought separate investment talents to the firm including a concentrated large cap value portfolio, fixed income, GARP investing, and a high dividend international ADR portfolio. But the three of us manage the firm and focus on running the growth portfolios.
TWST: How has it been over the last 12 to 18 months with all the volatility and the turmoil in the markets for your growth investing?
Mr. Stewardson: Obviously growth investing has been one of the most challenging areas of the market - but it's also been very rewarding in the last 9 months. We did under-perform in 2008; it was one of the few years that we had significant under-performance. It was a super challenging environment for really every asset class, but I think growth in particular. We observed that the high quality and liquid growth equities - like the ones we hold - were often viewed as the easy redemption money. In other words, in a market where you couldn't sell what you wanted to, you sold what you could. As a result, a lot of great growth names were punished with emotional selling pressure.
On a brighter side, in 2009, we had superb performance and a huge recovery. We'll get into that and talk about what we see coming up in the next year or two and it is fairly positive.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ABC, AMZN, CTSH, CTXS, DRI, ESRX, FCX, JWN, MHS, PCLN, RL, URBN
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