Randall Dishmon, manager of the Invesco Global Focus Fund (BJ04HD6), doesn’t believe in screening piles of data to find ideas. With every company he looks at, he asks three questions: does it have an advantage, is it attractively priced, and is management working for me?

If a stock can’t tick all three boxes, he isn’t interested. He doesn’t own Tesla, not because he dislikes the valuation but because he doesn’t believe founder Elon Musk has shareholders’ best interests at heart, as demonstrated by some of his more unusual capital allocation decisions.

Yet Dishmon’s fund – just one of many in his $2 billion remit – was up 43% in the year to the end of August due to his laser-like focus on finding high-growth ‘compounders’ and his high level of conviction. The fund, which has ongoing charges of 0.9%, only holds between 30 and 40 stocks worldwide.

‘We buy what we believe are great companies with attractive valuations’, says Dishmon. Regarding the recent listing of US cloud company Snowflake, Dishmon had followed the firm’s progress since it was founded but decided not to take part in the float as he felt the valuation was too rich.

His biggest bet is on technology, with Facebook the largest holding at just under 8% of assets. Dishmon believes there is a structural shift underway in advertising, with a dollar spent on Facebook, Google and Instagram ‘the best possible strategy’.

The mix of technology and healthcare in the portfolio should mean it is well positioned if we have another coronavirus-inspired correction given the pattern of trading seen in March 2020, while a focus on structural trends should underpin performance in the long term too.

The rise of e-commerce and digital payments is one obvious trend, as is cloud computing. Less obvious ones are biologics, medical products produced from living organisms, and digital customer service.

Hence his holdings in lesser-known but high-growth, high-return businesses such as Alteryx, CrowdStrike, Illumina, ServiceNow, Twilio and Wuxi Biologics.

Once he and his team have identified a theme, Dishmon spends ‘all my time trying to work out what’s the one thing a company needs to do to win out’.

In cloud computing for example he believes it’s being ‘cloud native’, in other words having no legacy business, which allows his companies to be agile.

Looking to Europe, one of his key holdings is Novo Nordisk, a stock which he believes he can own for the next ten years thanks to its dominant position in its markets.

His most recent purchase, also in Europe, is German-listed food delivery company HelloFresh, another firm he has known since inception and which he believes can continue to execute its growth strategy well while maintaining the positive economics of the business.

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