About Us

SFA Investimentos

Founded in 2013, SFA Investimentos is an independent asset manager, focused on equities. As a true partnership, all members are partners who invest in the fund they manage, ensuring alignment with the shareholders´ interests.

The fund’s investment philosophy is focused on selecting high-quality companies for long-term investments, with a fundamentalist approach. SFA applies technology to improve efficiency and obtain informational advantages, maintaining a concentrated portfolio to optimize value generation, regardless of sector, geography or company size.

Porto & SFA

In June 2024, Porto Asset and SFA Investimentos announced a strategic partnership, in which SFA becomes responsible for a relevant part of the equities allocation of Porto Asset.

With the operation, SFA remains 100% independent and can make use of the intelligence of Porto’s economic and credit areas – which, in turn, starts to benefit from SFA’s equities expertise.

Now, the partnership includes a change in the name of the fund, which is now called Porto SFA FIC FIA, and the creation of an institutional fund, Porto SFA Institucional FIC FIA.

Philosophy / What we do

Our investment philosophy focuses on identifying businesses that have the potential to create value sustainably over time. We look for companies with high value generation (EVA), strong competitive advantages (Moats) and led by a management team with an “owner” mentality.

We firmly believe that the quality of the company is the main factor that influences the performance of shares in the long term, directly reflecting on its ability to generate value. The price, in turn, is crucial in determining the margin of safety.

We adopt active management of our portfolio, implementing hedging strategies in the equities, interest, currency and commodities markets, in addition to taking advantage of tactical opportunities when they arise, always aiming to optimize returns for our investors.

We believe that to generate positive returns for our shareholders it is necessary to have a well-defined investment process run by a team of excellence. The process ensures the maintenance of our investment philosophy to identify good, well-managed companies, with strong competitive advantages and high potential for generating sustainable value in the long term. Our team is 100% committed to the philosophy and to the continuity and evolution of the process.

We divide the portfolio into companies:

Core: Companies that, after the end of the process, have a rating equal to or greater than 3.5 stars, out of 5. It means that they are companies that received the highest marks for management quality and business model, that is, they have strong competitive advantages and growth potential with value generation. These are positions that have greater weight in the portfolio and are invested for the long term.
Tactical: Companies that are still at some stage of the investment process, but we already have enough knowledge to set up a small position or companies that at the end of the process were not assigned a sufficient rating to be considered core. These are positions of lesser weight and invested intermittently.

It is important to note that valuation is not considered in the rating for classification between core and tactical, but rather helps to measure our margin of safety to size portfolio positions.

Our investment process aims to identify companies with:

Good management
Good Governance
Strong Competitive Advantages
Growth Potential with Value Generation

For each of the requirements discussed by the investment committee, we assign a score from 0 to 5 stars, which when weighted generate a final score that we call a rating. All companies analyzed by the SFA go through the investment process with the objective of being assigned a rating..

For us, the objective of investing in equities is to invest in companies with long-term growth and value generation and not just buy cheap to sell more expensive. Value creation consists of companies that generate profit above the cost of capital, good companies reinvest all or part of the profit to generate more return above the cost of capital. The true generation of wealth in the economic definition. If a company manages to grow its capital and generate value above its cost of capital for many years, we have a company that generates value and theoretically we can be eternal partners, without selling a share because this way we will have the invested capital preserved and with an attractive compound return for years.

Like a moat in a castle, which protect the castle from enemy invasions, companies with strong competitive advantages are able to remain generating value in the long term because they are well protected from competition, the biggest enemy of high returns on invested capital. We seek to identify and assign better ratings in our portfolio to companies that have one or more competitive advantages: