Motley Fool’s Mann Doesn’t Follow Global Herds

For Motley Fool, then, finding the best investment opportunities that offer growth potential means going counter-cyclically to the general direction of the stock market—something that the funds can easily do, Mann said, “because we are somewhat unconstrained in where we can go and what we can invest in.”

And due to the fact that in recent years there has been much investing along broader macroeconomic themes, there are many opportunities across the globe that the firm can avail of by simply going against the grain, Mann said.

Take Peru, for example. “It’s down 30% as people have found opportunities elsewhere, but for patient value investors like us, Peru is worth looking at now,” Mann said, “I am actually going down there in two weeks to have a series of meetings with a range of different companies that include everything from a Coca-Cola distributor to a company selling Alpaca wool.”

Face-to-face meetings are key for Mann and his team and they play an important part in determining the investment potential of companies. Take Nippon Indosari, for instance, the funds’ Indonesian investment: This is a company that holds 60% of the bread market in Indonesia, a country where increased middle class consumption is driving growth, Mann said, and it’s a highly trusted brand with a great management team that Motley Food has met with often. Ditto for HDFC Bank in India, which the team has met with 10 times already and is, according to Mann, “the best run bank in the entire world.”

“With any company, you can only tell so much by reading reports and numbers but getting to know management personally is very important for us, and because we travel a lot, we’ve also developed a nice network of people who can provide objective intelligence on companies, and they aren’t all our brokers, but include sell side researchers, university professors and even other investors, ”he said. “We actually follow a pretty simple formula here, which is ‘is something a good business, is it cheap, what are its prospects and are the right people running it.”