Overview

Maria Negrete-Gruson

Team Highlights

The investment team benefits from extensive emerging markets experience, continuity of its investment professionals and a rigorous research process.

  • All team members focus exclusively on finding emerging markets companies that offer sustainable returns on equity but fit tightly monitored risk and valuation parameters.
  • The investment team is composed of 7 individuals averaging more than 24 years of emerging markets investment experience.
  • The team is supported by an experienced global trading desk that averages more than 19 years of experience in global markets.
  • The team is principally based in New York.

Investment Process

The team seeks to invest in companies that are uniquely positioned to benefit from the growth potential in emerging markets and that possess a sustainable global competitive advantage.

Sustainable Earnings

The team believes that over the long term a stock’s price is directly related to the company’s ability to deliver sustainable earnings. The team determines a company’s sustainable earnings based upon financial and strategic analyses. The team’s financial analysis focuses on identifying historical drivers of return on equity, and our strategic analysis examines a company’s competitive advantages and financial strength.

Sustainability Assessment

We believe a company’s long-term direction and degree of change across multiple environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) metrics are important indicators of a company’s sustainable growth potential. Our sustainability assessment has incident-based and empirical components to evaluate a company’s historical, current and future potential behavior. We use a proprietary scoring system for the incident-based and empirical components of the assessment, which informs the team’s view of a company’s target price.

Risk Analysis

The team believes a disciplined risk framework allows greater focus on fundamental stock selection. The team incorporates its assessment of company-specific, sustainability and country-appropriate macroeconomic risk factors into its valuation analysis.

Valuation

The team believes investment opportunities develop when businesses with sustainable earnings are undervalued relative to peers and historical industry, country and regional valuations. The team values a business and develops a price target based on its sustainable earnings and the team’s risk analysis.

In-depth Investment Process

 

  • Maria Negrete-Gruson, CFA
  • Portfolio Manager
  • Sustainable Emerging Markets Fund
  • 32Years Investment
    Experience

Maria Negrete-Gruson, CFA, is a managing director of Artisan Partners and a portfolio manager on the Sustainable Emerging Markets team. In this role, she is the portfolio manager for the Artisan Sustainable Emerging Markets Strategy, including Artisan Sustainable Emerging Markets Fund. 

Prior to joining Artisan Partners in April 2006, Ms. Negrete-Gruson was the portfolio manager for DuPont Capital Management’s emerging markets equity portfolios. Before assuming responsibilities as portfolio manager, she was an international equity analyst at DuPont covering the developed Asia-ex Japan region. Earlier in her career, she was a foreign exchange trader for Banco Ganadero in Bogotá, Colombia. Ms. Negrete-Gruson holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and international relations from Universidad Externado in Colombia and a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia Business School. She is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.

A portfolio’s environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) considerations may limit the investment opportunities available and, as a result, the portfolio may forgo certain investment opportunities and underperform portfolios that do not consider ESG factors.