Punch & Associates is a Minneapolis, Minnesota based investment manager specializing in small and micro cap investing. We spend our time researching under-followed and neglected areas of the market in an effort to identify fundamentally attractive companies selling at value prices.
We are constant observers of investor behavior and our investment strategy seeks to exploit the inefficiencies that result from market irrationality. Financial markets are often highly emotional creatures that oscillate, sometimes dramatically, across a broad spectrum of human emotions (above). History has proven that the resulting impact on financial markets is considerable; as prices of assets begin to drift away from their underlying intrinsic values, significant opportunity is created for investors. To capitalize on this, we engage in what we internally refer to as "theme anticipation". This exercise is centered on identifying business characteristics, sub-sectors, and market groups that, although currently out favor, over time have the potential to capture the imagination of other investors as popular psychology and attitudes change. While our investment process is very much research intensive and dependent on the individual fundamentals and management teams of each company, behavioral finance and ultimately investor behavior plays an important role in each step of our process.
