Spotlight on Jason White, Lead Portfolio Manager, Global Discovery Strategy, Artisan Partners
Global Thought Leader Spotlight
Jason White, Lead Portfolio Manager, Global Discovery Strategy, Artisan Partners
In my role as the Lead Portfolio Manager for the Artisan Global Discovery Strategy at Artisan Partners, I am responsible for making investment decisions and managing assets within the Global Discovery strategy.
Along with our robust platform of investment professionals, I research and select securities based on our team’s bottom-up investment process, focused on finding compelling investment opportunities that fit our three criteria: franchise characteristics, an accelerating profit cycle and a reasonable valuation.
Ultimately, my aim is to deliver consistent, risk-adjusted performance in line with the investment mandate.
Key themes in SMIDs we seek to capture in our portfolio
Health care innovation: New drugs, devices, diagnostics and delivery models that make health care more effective and efficient.
Digital consumption: The shift of media consumption online, including growing digital ad revenues, AI-driven content personalisation and scaled platforms capturing engagement is creating strong monetisation opportunities.
Internal change: New management teams, new products, strategic acquisitions and other changes that can unlock growth and margin opportunities.
Transforming how we work: The development and use of modern software tools to facilitate a more collaborative, efficient, mobile and secure work environment.
Artificial intelligence: Progress made on predictive reasoning is driving disruption and innovation, which creates opportunities for companies that sell into the data centre supply chain, provide proprietary data sets and leverage data to drive business model breakthroughs.
Implications for sophisticated investors
We believe an allocation to global small/mid cap (SMID) stocks can be beneficial to investor portfolios. We also believe right now is an attractive tactical opportunity to get invested:
Historical data suggest that SMIDs outperforms large-cap
Historical data suggest that SMID outperforms small-cap
Historical data suggests that Active can outperform Passive
Fundamentals suggest that now is an attractive time to consider the SMID asset class due to expectations of higher growth and lower valuations when compared to large-cap equities
The underperformance of SMID over the past couple of years may have been for good reason. Smaller companies are typically more sensitive to interest rates and the economic cycle than larger companies. The global rate hiking cycle across many major economies and market concerns of an impending economic recession, due in part to these central bank actions, have weighed on small-cap stocks.
However, we believe this period of underperformance has opened an attractive valuation opportunity for many smaller companies that are leveraged to exciting secular trends.
Jason will be presenting at Global Investment Institute’s upcoming Equities Investment Forum, taking place on Wednesday, 10 September 2025 at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne, Victoria. To register your interest in attending, click here or for more information email zlatan@globalii.com.au.
Jason White, Lead Portfolio Manager, Global Discovery Strategy, Artisan Partners
Jason is a managing director of Artisan Partners and a portfolio manager on the Growth team.
In this role, he is the lead portfolio manager for the Artisan Global Discovery Strategy, a co-lead portfolio manager for the Artisan US Mid-Cap Growth Strategy, and a portfolio manager for Artisan’s Global Opportunities and US Small-Cap Growth Strategies.
Prior to joining Artisan Partners in June 2000, Jason was a Lieutenant in the US Navy, serving aboard the USS Lake Erie as the ship’s fire control officer.
Jason holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the United States Naval Academy, where he graduated with distinction.
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