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Anthony Cross
How do you identify a good investment in today’s
stock markets?
What is the key to buying good quality companies?
It is about focusing on the fundamental characteristics
of successful businesses.
These are companies with skilled employees producing quality goods, service companies that make a difference for their customers, market-leading companies that foster unswerving customer loyalty through the consistency and superiority of what they sell and innovative companies that push the technological boundaries of what they do and how they get it into the hands of their customers. Above all, they are sensible companies concentrating on the basic principles of building a business – retaining cash and running a prudent balance sheet, mindful of the pitfalls of over-expanding and chasing unrealistic profits growth.
Anthony Cross has been buying and owning sensible businesses for his award-winning Liontrust UK equity funds since 1998. He chooses companies based on their competitive strengths, which he calls Economic Advantage. Companies with Economic Advantage have distinctive, intangible characteristics that competitors struggle to reproduce.
The primary characteristics in Anthony’s companies are intellectual property, strong distribution networks and recurring income. In a world of relentless global competition, it is these strengths that enable some companies to grow their market share, protect prices and margins, and thus drive sustained profitability. |
This focus on the basic principles of building businesses works. Owning companies that excel through their quality, service and innovation has delivered award-winning performance. Anthony’s Funds are among the very small number in the UK to have delivered positive returns over the last two years. Award-winning and highly rated, Anthony manages three UK equity funds at Liontrust:
- Liontrust First Growth Fund
(All Companies Fund)
- Liontrust First Opportunities Fund
(All Companies Best Ideas Fund)
- Liontrust Intellectual Capital Trust
(Smaller Companies Fund)
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Biography
Anthony Cross joined Schroder Investment Management in 1990 as a graduate trainee, spending his first three years as a research analyst covering the support services and transport sectors. In 1994 he joined their Smaller Companies team, becoming number two on the desk in 1995. At that time, the team managed the largest number of smaller companies shares in the UK, spread over ten different funds. In 1997 Anthony joined Liontrust Asset Management, spending his first three months researching and documenting his approach to UK equity investment, known as The Liontrust Economic Advantage. Anthony has been managing UK Equity Funds at Liontrust since January 1998, winning the Citywire Best UK All Companies Manager and Portfolio Adviser Best Smaller Companies Manager in 2009.
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