These are Meridian Contrarian Fund's own holdings, not the firm's. Percentages are of the stock positions in its latest filing — the fund's cash and bonds are not included. A fund that buys small and mid-sized companies the market has pushed aside, where bad news has dragged the price down but the business underneath still looks sound. It looks for a visible catalyst for improvement — something that suggests the gap between the current price and the company's longer-term worth will actually close. The approach is risk-first: downside protection comes before chasing upside, favoring out-of-favor names with solid balance sheets and strong barriers to entry, and holding them through a patient stretch rather than trading in and out. The strategy got its start in 1994, when the fund launched as the Meridian Value Fund under founder Richard F. Aster, Jr.; it was later renamed the Meridian Contrarian Fund to match what it had become. For years it was run by Aster Investment Management, until ArrowMark Partners absorbed that firm in 2013 and brought the strategy and its manager along with it. Today the fund is managed by James England, who has run the strategy since 2001 and came to it with a trader's instincts: an analyst stint at the Los Angeles brokerage The Seidler Companies, then equity sales and trading at Goldman Sachs, then a role as an equity derivatives trader at Toronto Dominion Securities. The kind of value investing a former derivatives trader would design — less about betting on a rally than about not getting hurt on the way down.
$532.44M