SARA SILVERSTEIN: And as long-term investors, which we are in AAP, a lot of questions about, what is the timeline? What are we looking for when we're putting on a new position for it to reach its criteria?
CHRIS VERSACE: Yeah. Typically, it's 12 to 18 months. Sometimes the market can move faster and we have to revisit what the growth prospects. Are they accelerating? Are they decelerating? What's the company's position? Is it picking up share? Is margin growth unfolding faster than expected? So we tend to have a rolling 12 to 18 month time horizon.
Again, take a look at Axon-- we can use that-- because their business has grown tremendously this year because of the ramp in public safety spending, which is expected to continue. But inside the company, the transition from product to services, with services being significantly higher margins, is going to continue into 2024. That should allow earnings to continue to grow faster than revenue. So that's 12, 18, almost 24 months now of that unfolding. So again, while we look for 12 to 18 months, we're going to continue to revisit and reevaluate as we go forward.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And are there any restrictions you're looking at in terms of market cap when you're picking stocks?
CHRIS VERSACE: Well, I think the way to think about that is not so much are we going to exclude high market caps. I think we're more likely to exclude low market caps. But the better benchmark to measure against, Sara, is going to be trading volume.
The last thing we want is to take a position on a company, work our way up into it over time, and then not be able to get out of it. We don't want any of those roach motel names in the portfolio. This is why we tend to look at average daily trading volumes as well when we're trying to evaluate a position and really decide if it's warranted inside the portfolio.
Typically, we're looking for something not in the tens of thousands of shares, but call it hundreds of thousands of shares. Typically, 250,000, 300,000 at a minimum. But candidly, the vast majority of the positions in the portfolio are significantly higher than that.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And when you decide to pick a stock and you're looking at the portfolio overall, how do you decide what the position size should be?
CHRIS VERSACE: So the target position size, if you think of it this way, that in an ideal world, normalized market environment, let's call it, the portfolio is going to own somewhere between 8% and 12% cash. Call it 10%. So if we're going to have round numbers, 25 positions, over 90% of the portfolio's assets, that's about 3.6% for each position.
Now, look, we know that when we're building up some positions, it's going to take time to get there. And at the same time, we're going to want to let our winners run. Currently, we've got a couple of positions that are over 4%. I think they're very well positioned. And in the meantime, we're going to let them run while we start to catch up with some of these smaller positions in the portfolio.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And is there a maximum position size?
CHRIS VERSACE: So, yes, there is. Typically, we've started trimming back positions when they hit over 4%. Some have run as high as 4.5%, 4.6%. Again, we want to let our winners run. However, we have to be disciplined investors. And that means that if we see a position size approaching 5%, perhaps even topping 5%, that's going to warrant some action. As we like to say, ringing the register, trimming back that position, and either helping build back our cash or potentially, depending on the opportunities at the moment, repositioning those profits into one, maybe two other positions.