D’Artagnan Capital Fund Holdings Analysis

Author

Conall Kellner

Reason For Analysis

As a finance major at Xavier University about to head into the D’Artagnan Capital Fund (DCF), I wanted to know more about their choices in holdings. Does the DCF choose environmentally friendly companies over non-environmental ones even if the non-environmental ones perform better? As a catholic university this would be an issue in my opinion as the catholic church wants to prolong the environment and if the DCF is investing in companies that do the opposite then that would be a problem.

I will also look into other variables such as number of employees and if this has any affect on stock performance, along with some other analysis as well.

What is the D’Artagnan Capital Fund

The D’Artagnan Capital Fund is an actively-managed opportunities fund that focuses on investments in the large-cap and greater equity universe through a bottom-up valuation approach. Equities presented in the fund are researched extensively by sector analysts with the direction of portfolio managers who are responsible for their respective sectors. Through rigorous peer review of valuation models, research, and investment rationales, we seek to continuously outperform our benchmark, the S&P 500 Total Return index, on a risk-adjusted basis while remaining within our compliance by selecting the most mispriced equities in the universe that we can choose from.

This paragraph above was pulled directly from the DCF’s website. If you would like to investigate the fund further, here is the link to their home page: https://www.xavier.edu/capital-fund/.

The Data I used

The DCF currently has holdings in 41 publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq. I gathered this data by using Rstudio to scrape data from Google finance about these 41 companies. Because stock prices and financial data change very often I will mention that all of this data was taken on April 18th, 2024 at 10:30 am EST. The following is a list of all the groups of data I gathered from Google finance with a description of what that column has inside of it. I will include the link to download this data here: https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/kellnerm3_xavier_edu/EdFnsRsdYdVDjj32a8NUKS8BpHrI2cCizU0DylmluDkEJQ?download=1.

Data Dictionary

(All prices are in USD$)

  • Company name - Name of the publicly traded company and/or stock.

  • Exchange - The public exchange that the stock is traded on. Either NYSE or Nasdaq

  • Climate Score - A score provided by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) that rates a company on its climate transparency and performance. Not all companies had a score available in Google Finance, so some are null. Here is a link to their website if you want more information: https://www.cdp.net/en/

  • CEO - The company’s current Chief Executive Officer

  • Founded - The date the company was founded. Some dates only include the year while others are specified down to the day

  • Headquarters - The name of where the HQ of the company is. Google Finance did not have some of the HQ’s listed and as a result some may be Null.

  • Stock Price - The current stock price as of April 18th, 2024 at 10:30 am EST.

  • Previous close - The stock price at the previous days close.

  • Day range - The high and low of stock price from the previous day. So, April 17th 2024.

  • Year range - The high and low of stock price from the previous year. So, 2023.

  • Market capitalization - The total amount of stock in $ that is in the market. It is the price of the stock times the total shares outstanding (shares outstanding is not included in this data but could easily be found by dividing market capitalization by share price).

  • Average volume - The average number of shares traded each day over the past 30 days.

  • P/E ratio - The ratio of the current share price over the trailing twelve month earnings per share (EPS). This signals if the price of the stock is higher or lower than other stocks.

  • Dividend Yield Percentage - The ratio of annual dividends to current share price that estimates the dividend return of stock.

  • Employees - This is the total number of employees that works for the company.

  • Company History - This is a paragraph that describes the history of the company provided by Google.

  • Website - This is a website like that can be used to research the company or stock.

  • Page ID - This is the HTML link that was used to scrape each company’s page from Google finance.

    Another note before getting into the analysis and data. Just because a value is null/NA/missing does not mean that that company does not have that thing. For instance some companies may be shown with NA company history. This is simply because this was not listed on Google finance. Some of the stock information being null however may mean that that stock does not provide dividends for example. Tesla for example does not issue dividends and therefore will not have a dividend yield in this data.

Analysis

Stock by Score

This first analysis will be a boxplot showing average stock prices by climate score.

This is showing that higher scored climate score companies do seem to be selling at higher prices than lower scored companies.

Market Cap by Score

The next analysis will be similar but with market capitalization instead of stock price.

Once again it is shown that the average market capitalization for companies with companies having higher scores averaging higher market capitalization than those with lower scores.

Volume by Score

Now I will show the results of basically the same analysis but with average volume. This will show if worse climate scored companies are being traded more often or less often than better scored companies. If they on average are traded more than this could indicate that the general public makes similar environmental choices as the DCF.

For sake of the graph looking normal, 4 stocks with above 50 million average volume were removed. 3 of the stocks were rated between B and A while the 4th was null. This shows that most of the trades of these stocks happens between the higher rated climate companies. This would mean that most people are conscious of their investing decisions when it comes to the environment. But this is only a sample of 41 out of the thousands of stocks publicly available. So, further analysis of a larger sample would be required for a better conclusion. Also considering that the DCF seems to be choosing stocks based on an environmental view would already limit the lower scored companies.

P/E and Dividend by Score

further analysis of P/E ratio and Dividend yield percentage will be compared to climate score as well to essentially search for the same thing.

Lower scoring companies seem to be better priced than higher scoring ones.

This seems to be the first box plot that has an even result. The lower scored companies do seem to be on par if not higher paying dividend companies than the higher scored companies. But all of the other analysis outweighs this one.

Conclusion

DCF seems to select its holdings very carefully when considering the environment. While they do have a few holdings with lower rated scores, C or lower, which make up 14.63% of their holdings. The other 85.36% of their holdings are scored B or above. Meaning they do fallow the beliefs of the catholic church in keeping our environment safe and clean when considering holdings to choose.

Other Analysis

Market Cap by Employees

Market capitalization by number of employees.

5 stocks were excluded because they either had less than 10,000 employees or more than 1.5 million employees.

It seems that companies with more employees have the same market capitalization as companies that have less employees. There are some outliers with fewer employees and huge market capitalization as well. This could be hard to determine because some of these companies, like amazon, need a huge number of employees to run their company while another company like Google is mainly software and not manufacturing or transporting anything so they do not need as many employees.