Cardinal employs a disciplined, bottom-up investment process. The investment team does not screen for investment candidates based upon valuation but instead generates ideas by targeting market niches where they have a structural advantage.  Specifically, the team looks for companies where the financial information is not transparent or widely disseminated, there is little or no research coverage, current earnings and book value are a poor proxy for value, or where there is a recent fundamental change that the market has yet to properly account for. Cardinal focuses its fundamental research efforts on companies with market capitalizations below $7.5 billion and businesses the team considers to be sufficiently predictable that their discounted cash flow models provide useful information. Cardinal’s analysts conduct intensive fundamental research to gain a clear understanding of the competitive dynamics of the businesses they are assessing.  In addition, Cardinal invests with a long-term time horizon and focuses on absolute, not relative, risk of owning a company.  As a result, Cardinal is comfortable deviating from benchmark weightings to outperform over extended time periods and provide meaningful downside protection during challenging market environments.