We're all more passionate about business than the stock market. Long-term investment creates collective wealth, both for companies and for their shareholders. For us, long-term investment is also an opportunity to increase our incremental knowledge of companies, and therefore to understand them better.

We're a service company, not magicians who make your savings grow out of sight. Investors need to be able to measure their risk, and our customers need to know. They need to know what we're investing in (see Monthly Letter), why we're investing in it (see Focus on Companies), what we've done wrong, and what we've learned from it (see Annual Performance Report). For us, as a team, it's a way of working, because publicizing our research, our successes as well as our failures requires prudence, discipline and modesty. Management is a fascinating profession, because learning is never-ending; but it's only possible if you have the right tools. Transparency is our tool.

A team, tools: Investing - even in the stock market - is not a divinatory art; it's the result of a rational methodology fuelled by data and the work of a team. Historically, data was scarce and time-consuming to collect. For a long time, our activity remained a craft and a matter of chance. The proliferation of data has made sorting and prioritizing crucial. This is why we have invested heavily in the latest technological tools. This makes our investment process more reliable, and enables our team members to concentrate on what the machine can't do: make a decision.

We're long-term investors in companies, and so we look for investors with the same patience, who won't have the market's ups and downs as their compass. Our remuneration must therefore be in line with this partnership: TRANSPARENT and ALIGNED WITH OUR INVESTORS' INTERESTS. That's why none of our funds charge a turnover fee, and we were the first management company in the marketplace to introduce the High Watermark in funds.

And we eat the soup we sell: the team has invested in the fundsand our small savings represent more than 2% of the assets we manage! What's more, from 2018 onwards, our Company Savings Plan will be invested mainly in in-house funds, and variable remuneration will be partially paid in fund units.