Polen Capital Management

Polen Capital

US-listed stocks across every Polen account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. David Polen founded the firm in 1979 after working as a stockbroker in New York, then bootstrapped the business from Tampa, Florida, before moving its headquarters to Boca Raton in 2002. Since his death in 2012, Polen Capital has been run by Stan Moss, who came to the job through accounting: raised on a family farm in Alabama, he studied at the University of Alabama on a football scholarship, worked at Coopers & Lybrand, and ran the wealth and asset management division at Regions Bank before joining the firm in 2003 as chief operating and financial officer. Portfolio manager Damon Ficklin, who arrived the same year, heads the large-company growth team. Polen invests with what the firm calls a business-owner mindset: the team searches for companies with durable, compounding returns on the capital they deploy and clean balance sheets, then holds a small, high-conviction portfolio for years, rarely selling, letting earnings growth do the work. The flagship Focus Growth strategy launched in 1989; the firm has since added global and emerging-market strategies and, in 2021, bought a high-yield credit business. The founder's own story is the one worth retelling. A Brooklyn College graduate who got his start on Wall Street, David Polen developed a proprietary valuation style, built a concentrated shop around it, and shepherded the firm through a generation of growth before handing the flagship portfolio to his successor, Dan Davidowitz, in 2010.

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