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Equities

Can outperformance become a habit?

July 31, 2026 - 7 min
Athletic man training with jump rope
Paul Black
Portfolio Manager and Chief Executive Officer – WCM Investment Management
Sanjay Ayer, CFA®
Portfolio Manager – WCM Investment Management

WCM’s Select Global Growth strategy has had excellent long-term performance, beating its benchmark, the MSCI ACWI, by an average of 7.3% per year since inception in 2011. Over the past three years, however, the strategy is doing even better, beating its benchmark by around 20% per year1.

In this Q&A we ask Paul Black, co-CEO of WCM, and Sanjay Ayer, Portfolio Manager of Select Global Growth, how they achieved these exceptional returns, what sets the strategy apart, and whether they believe they can continue this outperformance for years to come.

Q: Within the WCM product line, what makes the Select Global Growth strategy unique?

Sanjay: It’s based on the same core philosophy that underpins everything at WCM. What we’re trying to do is identify change before other investors come around, through the lens of finding companies with improving economic moats, what we call ‘moat trajectory,’ and then strong, effective, and aligned corporate cultures designed to foster them.

Select Global Growth puts a bit of a spin on that philosophy, and it really applies that philosophy to a very specific, and I’d argue potentially lucrative, phase of a company’s moat trajectory life cycle.

It’s really the two to five-year period, when a genuinely great business transitions from being misunderstood to widely accepted as a consensus leader.

To bring it to life, when I was coming into the business, companies like Amazon and Google were just starting to kind of enter their narrative inflections, but at that time, they were highly, highly controversial companies. Google was one Yahoo innovation away from extinction. Amazon was widely perceived to be a bad business. “How can you subsidise a shipping offering like Prime when you’re not profitable?”

Ten years ago, I was at Nvidia’s analyst day. There were less than 20 people there, sharp-shooting Jensen on how he could defend his gaming chip business against the great Intel. These things seem silly now, but it goes to show that narratives and fundamentals can inflect quickly.

And that’s really the name of the game with Select Global Growth: to take that moat trajectory and culture and apply them where you can really leverage that inflection period in a company’s life cycle, with the goal of capturing a disproportionate share of that company’s lifetime outperformance or alpha.

And our entire research process, research team, team design, is oriented around trying to recognize these stories early: not just in tech, or consumer, where conventional growth investors look. It’s just having that relentless curiosity, looking around the world, looking for pockets of inflections, using that moat trajectory and culture compass to help identify them, and then wrapping them very sensibly in a well-constructed portfolio.

The other distinction I’d mention is Select Global Growth is unconstrained. So in many ways, it’s the most fun product to run. We can really flex all of WCM’s competitive assets, competitive advantages, and look in corners of the market where really no one’s looking. And time and again, we’ve been among the first buy-side investors of note to look at a company we end up investing in.

We have talked about why do money managers fail, what do people miss? I think, unless you’re highly intentional about it, the gravities of the industry are too powerful. They pull you towards conformity.

Unless you’re highly intentional about it, the gravities of the industry are too powerful. They pull you towards conformity.

They pull you towards rigidity. They pull you towards complexity, and you see it time and again.

Most of the time, if you’re a successful manager – and we study this – you do one thing very well, but it’s very narrow, and the market rewards you for it. You do spectacularly, and then when the backdrop changes, as it has over the last five, six years, you just don’t have the toolkit or wherewithal to adapt, and you fade to irrelevance over a long period of time. It’s a backward-looking philosophy.

I would argue with conviction that moat trajectory and culture, and this concept of narrative inflections, they’re purpose-built for flexibility. They’re very forward-looking in nature. When you talk about the past five years, I think having that flexible portfolio and philosophy is what has enabled WCM, to pull away from some of our peer set in that quality growth camp.

Q. What do you say to clients who ask if they can expect similar returns to those you have achieved in the last few years?

Paul: That’s the big question. What are we doing that’s different that should give future investors some hope they can get these kinds of outsized returns, while keeping in mind that past performance doesn’t tell us what future results will look like?

There are two main things.

Firstly, we look at competitive advantage very differently to the rest of the market. Seemingly every manager, every investor in the world wants to buy a company with a strong competitive advantage. We have found it’s not just about buying those companies with the strongest competitive advantage. What’s really most important is having a competitive advantage that is actually growing and getting better, day after day, week after week, year after year.

What’s really most important is having a competitive advantage that is actually growing and getting better, day after day, week after week, year after year.

Every business’s competitive advantage is ebbing and flowing, and what you want to own are companies where you can make the case for various reasons that the probabilities of their competitive advantage being stronger in the next decade are very high.

And I’ll give you an example. It’s an older example, but I think it’s the most brilliant. If we go back to 2007, and we were going to look for a really high-quality business with a huge competitive advantage selling at a discount to intrinsic value, which is what everybody looks for, we would have settled on Nokia.

In 2007, Nokia had approximately 53% share of the cell phone market. They were dominant across the globe, high returns on capital, no debt, lots of free cash flow, great brand, what’s not to love, selling at 60 cents on the dollar. In fact, most analysts on Wall Street had a buy recommendation on Nokia because it was dominant and it had a huge competitive advantage. Well, we don’t have to think very hard to see what ultimately happened with Nokia. Was that really a high-quality business?

Our argument would be no. If you’re looking at the directionality of the competitive advantage, you would have realised that that’s not a high-quality business because the competitive advantage was being eroded. We all know now, in hindsight, that Apple and Android completely destroyed that company.

Now, most managers, when they had a bad quarter or two, or three or four, would double down on their investment because they’d say, “Well, it’s still a dominant business, still has a great franchise and brand. Let’s buy more of it because it’s cheaper.” And that is a classic example of what the world does, Wall Street in particular, in terms of investing. So we’ve turned that on its head. The questions we ask are: what is the probability the business we want to invest in is going to be stronger, vis-à-vis everybody else in their industry?

If we get that right, we feel like we’re a long way toward a successful investment.

Two: we focus on the people.

Companies are about people. I always kind of chuckle when people talk about corporations as inanimate objects. They are not: they are full of people. We do a lot of work on culture and people and when we do our research we’re looking for three things:

We want to see a really strong alignment between the values and what they’re trying to do on the strategy side.

We want to see strength throughout the organisation, at every level, in those values.

And then, most importantly, we need to see adaptability in the company’s culture.

Now, Nokia is a great example. They were not willing to disrupt those old brick phones that they made in order to create the smartphone because it would take away their cash cow. So they lacked adaptability.

It’s hard to overemphasise how important people are to the success of an organisation. Here’s the best part: Wall Street doesn’t believe it exists. Why? Because they can’t quantify it.

Wall Street only believes things exist that they can put in a spreadsheet, rank it, and score it. And with people, you can’t do that. You build a mosaic, and the mosaic is an art, and it takes a lot of work over a lot of time. But I will tell you, those two ideas – owning companies where the competitive advantage is getting stronger, and then making sure that they have a culture and a set of beliefs and people that will animate them to grow that competitive advantage over time. That’s the big picture idea in terms of how we have generated these kinds of returns and why we believe we should continue to be able to do so.

WCM Select Global Growth Equity Fund Performance2

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results

1 Source for all stats in paragraph: WCM, as of 31 March, 2026, net of fees.

2 As at 31/03/2026. LU2169559866 - I/A (USD) Source: Natixis Investment Managers International. Reference index: MSCI ACWI NET TR USD INDEX (www.msci.com). Some recent performance may be lower or higher. As the value of the capital and the returns change over time (notably due to currency fluctuations), the repurchase price of the shares can be higher or lower than their initial price. The performance indicated is based on the NAV (net asset value) of the share class, and is net of all charges applying to the fund but does not account for sale commissions, taxation or paying agent fees, and assumes that dividends if any are reinvested. Taking such fees or commissions into account would lower the returns. The performance of other share classes would be higher or lower based on the differences between the fees and the entry charges. In the periods where certain share classes are not subscribed or not yet created (inactive share classes), performance is calculated based on the actual performance of an active share class of the fund whose characteristics are considered by the management company as being closest to the inactive share class concerned, after adjusting it for the differences between the total expense ratios (TER), and converting any net asset value of the active share class in the currency in which the inactive share class is listed. The performance given for the inactive share class is the result of a calculation provided for information.

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This material is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects views and opinions shared as of the date indicated. It should not be considered investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or a complete description of WCM Investment Management’s (“WCM”) products or services. The views expressed are subject to change and may not reflect the views of WCM as a whole.

Each investment strategy has its own objectives, risks, and investment approach. Clients and prospective investors should review all relevant disclosures, offering documents, and investment objectives before making any investment decision. Any securities referenced are provided for illustrative or contextual purposes only, including as real-world examples, and may not have been held in any WCM strategy or fund. References to specific securities do not represent all securities purchased, sold, or recommended for client accounts, and should not be assumed to have been or to be profitable.

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