The Driehaus US Growth Equities team focuses on investing in US-listed equities of public companies with market capitalizations between $100 million and $15 billion, through the Driehaus Micro Cap Growth, Driehaus Small Cap Growth, Driehaus Small/Mid Cap Growth and Driehaus Life Sciences strategies. The strategies provide investors with high active share portfolios of companies experiencing positive fundamental changes in addition to exposure to positive growth inflections, earnings surprises and earnings revisions, factors that are positively correlated to alpha generation. The team is led by Jeff James who began his portfolio management career at Driehaus in 1998. He is supported by seven analysts that combined have over 50 years of Driehaus research experience.
Our institutional sales team will be pleased to address questions and requests related to separately managed accounts and/or institutional commingled vehicles that employ our investment strategies.
Ask Us!The strategy seeks to outperform the Russell Microcap® Growth Index over full market cycles.
The strategy seeks to outperform the Russell 2000® Growth Index over full market cycles.
The strategy seeks to outperform the Russell 2500® Growth Index over full market cycles.
The strategy intends to exploit the inefficiencies in how markets assign risk to development-stage and early-commercial stage healthcare companies.
The team employs a growth-oriented investment philosophy focusing on identifying company-specific growth inflection points and exploiting associated marketplace inefficiencies. Core to the philosophy are the beliefs that: earnings are the primary driver of equity prices over time, market expectations tend to be ‘anchored’ to historical information and points of inflection therefore introduce dislocations between market expectations and fundamentals which generate significant alpha capture opportunities. The team combines fundamental, macro/sector/industry and behavioral analysis in its investment process together with a nimble/active investment approach to quickly identify inefficiencies and generate a portfolio, which uniquely seeks to achieve superior aggregate growth rates as well as superior risk characteristics.
The U.S. equity market experienced a strong opening quarter to start 2024. Large caps and growth as a style outperformed small caps and value, respectively. Still, it was a strong first quarter for smaller caps and U.S. equities overall. Thematically, we want to highlight the topic we have been most frequently asked about by our investors in recent months – AI (Artificial intelligence). Ever since the debut of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, excitement around AI has grown massively.
This month’s commentary examines contributors and detractors from this quarters performance, as well as recent portfolio shifts, in greater detail.