Shepherd’s Hill Capital Advisors is a SEBI-registered investment advisor. Our primary goal is to protect your capital over the long term while achieving the best possible return.
The advisory service is a way for clients to begin the journey of long-term investing with us by using our non-discretionary advice. We will help you build a quality portfolio of companies to grow your savings over the 5+ year time horizon.
We are long-term, equity-focused value investors. We look for companies that have intrinsic or inherent value that are not priced correctly by the market for some short-term or irrational reasons. While this is not easy, because the market is very efficient in its assessments, it is not impossible.
Owing to our relatively smaller size, we can take positions in small companies in addition to large, blue chip companies. This size advantage allows us to find mispriced “hidden gems” along with large, well-known companies.
We will maintain a balance between diversification and focus by holding roughly 15-20 positions in the portfolio. This framework seeks to avoid the risk of concentration in just a few positions while seeking to outperform the index or the average mutual fund that has 50 or 100 stocks in it.
We have a 10-year track record and expertise in the Indian capital markets as an advisory service provider. Our focus is primarily on securities of Indian companies that are listed on the Indian stock exchanges i.e. the BSE and NSE. We can accept Indian and Non-Resident Indians (NRI) as clients.
We use a bottom-up approach to investment research. This means a focus on company-level operations. Investment decisions are made purely on the merits of the security under consideration. We do not use macro or sector analyses as a starting point for our research.
We require all new investors to commit to an investment time period of 5 years. This long-term perspective allows us to take advantage of "time-arbitrage" opportunities. That is, we buy good, well-run companies at prices that are priced attractively due to short-term considerations.
Investment Advisory Service, or IAS, is a service which you can use to save and invest money. These services can be of many types and have many strategies. Typically, a service provider will provide advice for a fee. These advisors must have a license from Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). IAs are different from mutual fund distributors and agents that are focused on product sales, not client advice.
A non-discretionary advisor will provide advice for the client to act on. The advisor may provide implementation services to actualise the advice, on specific instruction from the client. The client has final discretion on investments and the advisor cannot act with a blanket power of attorney from the client.
While we are happy to walk you through our process and hypothetical examples of the types of companies we recommend, we cannot share proprietary information about portfolio holdings.
No. The fee structure is the same for all clients.
The following are the steps in our investment process:
Screening and Short-listing. We use proprietary screening tools and software to focus on only those companies that we believe merit further research and analysis. With approximately 5,000 listed companies on the Indian exchanges, we focus our research on a high-quality subset with the goal of achieving operational efficiencies.
Checklist Verification. We will employ a proprietary checklist to identify any red flags that appear with respect to a potential investment. Issues for scrutiny include related party transactions, joint ventures, equity or debt investments in other companies, loans and advances that have been written off, exorbitant salaries to managers, and preferential allotments.
Financial Analysis. We will perform an extensive quantitative analysis with respect to potential investments. We will analyse multiple years of publicly available data to create a financial picture covering many facets of operations, including profit margins, return on assets, debt levels, operating leverage, and dividend yields.
Qualitative Research. We will research and judge the qualitative aspects of each potential investment. Topics relevant to this part of the process include management quality, minority shareholder communication (including quarterly investor calls), business moats, and relationships with suppliers and customers.
Comparative Analysis. When the number of available investment opportunities exceeds the number of investments that the portfolio can contain, the fund manager will compare ideas to each other in order to assess the relative attractiveness of each. Considerations relevant to this analysis include over- or under-exposure in an industry sector and perceived correlations between assets.
Decision Point. A deliberate decision is taken on the choice of portfolio company considering all factors, with price of entry being key.
Continuous Portfolio Monitoring. Once an investment decision has been made, we will monitor each position continuously. Along with each investment decision, we will monitor the entire portfolio in an effort to ensure that any portfolio-level risks are considered and mitigated to the extent possible.
