Focused global investing built on quality, consistency, and sustainable long term growth.
Polen Capital
Manager
January 2015
Inception of Strategy
USD
Base Currency
Investment Philosophy
The Polen Global Growth strategy seeks to achieve long-term growth by building a concentrated portfolio of outstanding businesses with competitive advantages and the potential for sustained superior growth.
At Polen Capital, long-term thinking is at the heart of every decision. They implement a disciplined, bottom-up investment approach that focuses on building concentrated portfolios of exceptional global businesses with enduring competitive advantages. This philosophy is grounded in the belief that high-quality companies, those with strong balance sheets, resilient earnings profiles, and forward-looking leadership, are best positioned to deliver sustainable, above-average earnings growth over time. This repeatable, high-conviction process is designed not only to compound wealth but to preserve capital and navigate market volatility with confidence and clarity.
Polen's research framework is built on a fundamental observation: consistent earnings growth is the primary engine of long-term value creation. They seek to identify companies with a durable and defensible earnings stream, underpinned by sound financials and visionary management teams. Through rigorous, in-depth analysis and a business owner mindset, the team aims to invest in businesses that can thrive across market cycles. By focusing on quality and maintaining a long term investment horizon, Polen aligns their process with clients’ goals, delivering resilience, transparency, and the opportunity for meaningful long-term results.
Damon Ficklin
Portfolio Manager
Founded in 1979, Polen Capital is a global investment manager that provides actively managed growth equity and high-yield credit strategies. Polen delivers distinctive growth and income solutions, building high-conviction, concentrated, competitively advantaged portfolios with the potential to compound and outperform over the long-term. The firm has a distinctive culture and is committed to attracting, developing, and retaining exceptional professionals who are aligned with the firm’s mission of preserving and growing clients’ assets to protect their present and enable their future.
Stephen Atkins CFA, Portfolio Manager, Strategist & Analyst at Polen Capital, explains why his firm believes in active management based on historical evidence over the past 20-30 years.
Jean Maunoury, Deputy CEO and CIO of Research and Investment at iM Global Partner, speaks with June Lui, Portfolio Manager & Analyst for Emerging Markets Growth at Polen Capital, about investment strategies in Chinese equities. June explains Polen Capital’s long-term, fundamentals-driven approach to investing in China, focusing on structural growth opportunities and high-quality companies rather than short-term market trends. She highlights the importance of being selective, emphasizing management quality, business models, and valuations. The discussion also covers the limitations of traditional Chinese equity benchmarks, often dominated by state-owned enterprises, and why Polen Capital avoids them in favor of independent research.
In this conversation, Jean Maunoury, Deputy CEO and CIO of Research and Investment at iM Global Partner, speaks with June Lui, Portfolio Manager & Analyst for Emerging Markets Growth at Polen Capital, to explore how Polen Capital’s Emerging Market teams collaborate effectively.
In this video, Damon Ficklin, Head of Team and Portfolio Manager at Polen Capital and Lead Portfolio Manager for the Global Growth Strategy, outlines the firm’s disciplined investment philosophy centered on three key advantages: portfolio concentration, long-term holding periods, and rigorous risk management. He explains how Polen Capital focuses on selecting 20 to 30 of the world’s highest-quality growth companies, leveraging a long-term investment horizon to let fundamentals drive returns rather than market timing. The investment process uses five guardrails, high return on equity, strong earnings and free cash flow growth, solid balance sheets, improving margins, and organic revenue growth, to filter a broad universe down to about 100–150 best-in-class businesses, while excluding cyclical and competitively weak firms. ESG factors are fully integrated into their analysis, ensuring companies manage risks and capture opportunities. This methodical approach has delivered consistent performance over decades and remains central to Polen Capital’s mission of protecting and growing client capital.
The Team
