Asset Manager of the Year Bill Orke on Creating Long-Term Wealth

WCM Quality Global Growth Strategy includes about 30-35 holdings. The investment team spends most of its time attempting to forecast the trajectory of businesses’ competitive advantages.

According to Bill Orke, a portfolio specialist with Laguna Beach, California-based WCM Investment Management, the winning portfolio is “essentially … that of a high-quality large-cap traditional growth strategy for the global universe … designed chiefly to protect [against] the downside in the marketplace.”

Much of the strategy’s success, Orke says, relies on its fundamental bottom-up approach.

The group’s fundamental bottom-up analysis helps define its success. In Orke’s words, “We put a lot of emphasis on whether or not the [company’s] economic moat is growing, and if these organizations are actually competing and winning within their industry group and amongst their peers.”

This performance is critical, he explains, because it can bode well for corporate valuations. “In other words, they demand higher [price-to-earnings ratios], and there’s a lot of wealth creation along the line,” he said.