Ancora/Thelen Small Cap Core Strategy

Philosophy

The strategy typically invests at least 80% of its net assets in the equity securities of small companies. We define Small Cap as companies with market caps between $100 million and $3 billion. We focus on this range of companies because we believe it affords us the greatest opportunity from which to select underappreciated stocks. Specifically, we target:

• Franchise: Companies with unique competitive advantage that are temporarily mispriced.
• Underfollowed: Companies that receive little or no Wall Street research attention.
• Special Situations: Companies going through some type of corporate restructuring, changes in capital structure, emerging from bankruptcy, or spinoffs.

The strategy will stay broadly diversified across all major market sectors and focus on stock selection (not sector bets) to drive alpha.

Process

• Portfolio Construction: Typically 50-70 portfolio holdings that are fully diversified across economic sectors.
• Buy Discipline: Companies that fall into one of the three target investment themes
• Sell Discipline: A holding will be sold when the fundamentals of the company begins to deteriorate, when a better investment opportunity is found, or after the stock reaches a predetermined price level based on our intrinsic valuation calculation.
• Risk Management: Position sizes are limited to 5% of the portfolio at cost.