[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, I'm Shane Duffy, portfolio manager of the JP Morgan International Focus Strategy. Along with my co-portfolio manager, Tom Murray, I've been managing the strategy since its inception in November 2011. Simply put, our objective with International Focus is to deliver a high conviction portfolio of our best ideas outside the US. We believe that by investing in a portfolio of 40 to 50 of our highest conviction stocks leveraging the full breadth of our research resources, we can deliver strong, consistent, excess returns.

Our investment approach is built around three pillars. The first is a culture of collaboration. We achieve our best results when we harness the collective insights of our analysts around the globe and when we have a strong partnership between analysts and portfolio managers. Second is our commitment to global research. We fundamentally believe that international markets are inefficient, and there are rewards for diligent bottom-up research identifying companies whose fundamentals are mispriced. Finally, it's our keen focus on risk management. Our aim is to build a portfolio of select companies we believe can create significant shareholder value but where risks are carefully managed.

In practice, building conviction portfolios requires a disciplined approach to bottom-up research. The bedrock of our research capability lies in our regional teams. At JP Morgan Asset Management, we're fortunate to have over 80 fundamental equity analysts across developed and emerging markets following the same investment research approach.

Many thousands of hours each year are spent meeting with company suppliers, customers, industry experts, and so on to help identify key trends, inform our forecasting, and assess risks. This research framework employed across the firm is an incredibly powerful common language that enables us to compare ideas from all over the world in a consistent way.

Leveraging this regional research. We also have a dedicated team of global sector specialists, global analysts with deep sector expertise working in close partnership with their regional counterparts. With well over 2000 investable stocks outside the US, having a dedicated global research resource enables us to effectively scour that universe for the very best opportunities.

This combination of local breadth and global sector depth enables us not only to build high levels of conviction but also to draw on a range of uncorrelated ideas. This is key to our portfolio construction. It's an investment process we've employed at JP Morgan Asset Management for over 20 years now. And we believe it is key to the results we have been able to deliver.

Hello, my name is James Andrew, and I'm the global sector specialist covering global internet, media, and consumer brands.

Hello, my name is Bilquis Ahmed, and I'm one of more than 80 analysts within the Global Research Team with a focus on European retail. James and I have been collaborating for well over a decade now and have witnessed several structural shifts within the consumer space during that time.

The most striking, of course, has been digitalization in all its forms with the channel shift to e-commerce being the most obvious. But other notable shifts have been the increased attention to environmental and social concerns as well as the concentration of market shares in strong brands or franchises.

Not only have we seen the more agile brand business embrace new tools to strengthen consumer engagement, we've also seen the internet platforms continue to innovate. These companies have leveraged their capabilities to expand their addressable markets, which has led us in many cases to lift our long-term expected return outlook.

A global and regional collaboration works by combining the depth and breadth of our research efforts. With local insights, Bilquis is able to get into the details of product offerings and operational execution.

Whereas James can apply the insight from covering more mature global companies or the emerging trends from the tech space to properly identify long-term winners. This helps to keep us asking the challenging questions of company management teams so we can evaluate the mid-term value creation potential.

From the US to Europe and Asia, this has helped us be early in identifying the long-term potentiation from revenue streams like advertising and payments. We've seen a number of internet platforms that are built scaling in these areas beyond their primary businesses. That's a very powerful path to long-term value creation.

Hi I'm Alexei Kapkin, global sector specialist looking at the global bank sector. In contrast to consumer sector with big global brands and platforms, the banking sector is largely a local business. Understanding market structures, regional regulation, and competitive environment are therefore fundamental to making informed investment decision.

Having the local expertise of our regional teams is tremendously valuable in tackling this issues and helping us focus on the best business models globally. Building on the regular discussions with my regional colleagues, my edge comes from applying a global framework to look at the best ideas within the global banking sector. My aim is to balance cyclical instructional trends.

On the structural side, identifying the most attractive market structures creates an opportunity to own genuine, long-term [INAUDIBLE]. For instance, banks operating in economies with low credit penetration can outgrow peers elsewhere, or those operating in less competitive markets or more benign regulatory environments can earn strong return on capital through the cycles.

On the cyclical side, regional macro factors have been a significant driver of relative performance through various economic cycles. Here, a global perspective is very valuable as we can learn from outcomes across the world. Having worked as a bank analyst for 20 years, I have lived through a number of cycles, including global and regional financial crisis. Being careful to avoid the downside of that volatility through the cycle is key for long-term performance.

Hi, I'm Tom Murray, co-portfolio manager of the International Focus. You've heard from some of our analysts and learned more about the global research platform, but let's explore how we harness that for International Focus. The culture of collaboration at JP Morgan Asset Management is key to everything we do. We've worked hard to create a culture that is free of silos and brings collaboration to the fore. This is evident across our investment process, aligning the very best of the regional research teams with the insights and unique global perspective of our global sector specialists.

Within our team, too, we ask the sector specialists to continue that collaboration to work together across sectors to explore structural themes that transcend traditional industry boundaries. All of this helps inform our sector strategy, our big picture view of the key themes playing out in the world.

But while structural shifts are important, it's ultimately stock selection and risk management that drive portfolio returns. We are fortunate that the research platform serves up a number of high conviction ideas. Our job as portfolio managers is to leverage that to build a concentrated, style agnostic core portfolio with significant differentiation versus the index.

The essence of the portfolio manager's job is to subject every potential idea to the highest standard of due diligence and be the gatekeeper of risk at the portfolio level. We feel very confident in the bottom-up research across the firm, but a key part of our risk management is testing each and every investment thesis. What are the range of outcomes? Where could we be wrong? What is our confidence in our assumptions? Upside needs to be balanced against risk. As portfolio managers, we are ultimately responsible for every stock selected, and we carefully consider the correlations, volatility, and risk characteristics of competing ideas.

The firm's investments in our technology platform, Spectrum, has been critical in giving portfolio managers risk management tools at their fingertips. Spectrum gives us a central source for stock level insights and research, portfolio analytics, and risk metrics across all of the portfolios we manage as well as being our order implementation platform. This creates tremendous efficiency for the portfolio management team.

We believe that this alignment of first-class global research, a culture of collaboration, and a holistic understanding of risk is what really differentiates JP Morgan Asset Management and the International Focus Strategy. Shane and I have been fortunate to work together in this investment process for over two decades. We've seen it deliver out through some of the most turbulent market environments you could expect to see. We continue to believe the strength of our Global Research Platform, the consistency of our investment approach, and the stability and experience of our team gives us all the ingredients to continue to deliver in what is sure to be an unpredictable but exciting future.

Hi, I'm Giri Devulapally, Lead Portfolio Manager of the Large Cap Growth Strategy for the past 15 years. Our approach to growth investing is one which seeks to invest in companies where our perspectives into the potential magnitude and duration of growth are differentiated relative to market expectations.

These underappreciated growth companies possess three key characteristics. First, they're going after large addressable markets. Next, they have sustainable competitive advantages. And third, their stocks exhibit strong price momentum.

We try to also manage a few key risks in this strategy and do so by focusing on capturing the big winners while mitigating the impact from big underperformers. Within Large Cap Growth, our portfolio positioning is adapting to a changing opportunity set. Our process is agnostic as to the sectors and industries in which the great growth stocks reside.

We will go wherever we find opportunities that meet our investment criteria. More specifically, we've been trimming and eliminating the multi-year outperformers. Many of the largest contributors over the past several years, such as Nvidia, ServiceNow, and Mastercard, have significantly outperformed for a prolonged period of time. Some of these stocks now trade at historically high relative valuations, which suggests these companies may no longer be underappreciated.

Consistent with our process, we've been actively reducing exposure to this cohort of companies. For example, software, which was prominent in the portfolio as recently as 18 months ago, is now much smaller, as we have reduced or sold quite a few formerly large holdings such as ServiceNow, Viva and Atlassian. Similarly, our reduced exposure to other stocks, such as Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe that have become very large in the benchmark due to a prolonged period of outperformance, leaves us with a notable underweight in the technology sector.

New high-conviction opportunities are emerging within the portfolio. We continue to shift into newer ideas where we see improving fundamentals, but the stocks are just beginning to be recognized by the market. In other words, the gap between our view and market expectations is wide.

Several of our top overweights are companies that were initially purchased over the past year, companies such as Deere, Snap, Zillow, and Freeport-McMoRan. Other areas have also been scaled up in traditional financials, consumer, and select industrials. Importantly the top 10 overweights now are quite different when compared to the top 10 from about 18 months ago.

We continue to be active as we adapt to the changing opportunity set. The net result of all that I've highlighted is a greater balance within the portfolio. As always, we seek to deliver the strongest relative performance that we can against our benchmark through a diversified and style pure approach. We will continue to do so while staying true to our risk management philosophy. Thank you.