Equity Innovation SMA
A concentrated portfolio of 20-25 public companies growing fast enough to change the arithmetic. Every position is selected by one manager and held directly in an account with your name on it at Charles Schwab.
Primary benchmark: S&P 500 Total Return. Nasdaq 100, BVP Emerging Cloud and ARKW are shown as secondary context.
Equity Innovation SMA
Own the companies changing the earnings curve. A concentrated, long-only portfolio of public companies selected for exceptional forward growth, durable economics, and the ability to compound at a rate that can materially change a household's long-term wealth.
Primary benchmark: S&P 500 Total Return. Nasdaq 100, BVP Emerging Cloud and ARKW are shown as secondary context.
Find the companies growing fast enough to change the math.
Innovation is not technology exposure. It is a narrower job: own a small number of public businesses whose growth, economics and reinvestment runway justify an aggressive allocation — and keep re-underwriting them as the evidence changes.
Which public companies can still compound like private ones?
The search starts top-down. We look for whole industries growing 20–25% a year, because a company fighting its own industry’s gravity rarely wins for long. Only then does it become a bottom-up question: inside those industries, which are the fastest-growing businesses, and do the economics underneath the growth hold up — gross margin, scalability, balance sheet, competitive position, and the price being asked.
The portfolio is deliberately small. The goal was never to own the innovation economy. It is to own the handful of names where the evidence is strongest, sized by conviction, and to be honest when the evidence stops supporting a position.
Growth is the gate, not the thesis.
Forward revenue growth above 25% is the threshold a name has to clear before anyone looks at it seriously. Clearing it earns a company research, nothing more.
The economics under the growth.
High gross margins, unit economics that improve with scale, and somewhere real to reinvest. That is what distinguishes a durable compounder from a company having a good two years.
Concentration is the point.
Around twenty positions, weighted by conviction. This is built to be the aggressive sleeve of a larger allocation — not somebody’s whole portfolio.
- You already hold the market somewhere else and want an aggressive sleeve on top of it
- You have a decade or more before you need the money
- You have sat through a 40% decline before and did not sell
- You want to see and control every position you own
- This would be most of what you own
- You will need to draw on it within a few years
- A year like 2022 would make you sell at the bottom
- The money is inside an employer plan — Innovation is not available there, and Equity Growth is the closest mandate that is
The threshold is a real filter, not a slogan.
Measured across the S&P 500 on the same definition — consensus forward revenue growth for the next fiscal year — only a couple of dozen companies in the entire index clear 25%. That is the size of the pond this portfolio fishes in, and it is why the book looks nothing like an index fund.
A track record meant to be inspected, not advertised.
Every daily return behind these figures is published and downloadable. Change the window, switch to net of fees, and the numbers recompute in front of you — including the windows that do not flatter us.
Figures are gross of fees unless the chart is switched to net, and include backtested performance before the live inception date of —. Backtested results are hypothetical, carry the benefit of hindsight, and are not a guarantee of future results. The full daily series is open for inspection, and the method is set out in the ranking section.
Against every fund in the file, not a hand-picked benchmark.
Thousands of exchange-traded funds, sorted best to worst on the same window, drawn as one curve. Innovation is the gold mark. Hover anywhere to see which fund sits at that rank — the whole universe is in the public dataset, so anyone can rebuild this independently.
You own the stocks. Schwab holds them. Bull Run manages them.
Almost every investor knows what an ETF is and what a mutual fund is. Far fewer have met a separately managed account — and the difference is not a detail. Every advantage below descends from one structural fact.
When an ETF is genuinely the better tool.
Below the minimum, an ETF wins outright. Inside a 401(k) or another employer plan, an SMA is usually not even available. In a fully tax-deferred account most of the tax-control advantage disappears, because there are no lots to harvest and no gains to manage. And if somebody wants one line item and no complexity, that is a legitimate preference, not a mistake.
One correction worth making, because it gets misused as a selling point: ETFs almost never distribute capital gains. Their creation and redemption mechanism scrubs them out. The real limitation is different — an ETF is a single line item, so if eight of its holdings are down while the fund is up, the losses you could have harvested are exactly zero.
What direct ownership is actually worth, in one number.
Say a third of the positions are down on the year while the portfolio overall is up. Move the slider to your portfolio size and pick a rate.
Illustrative only. Bull Run does not publish position-level returns and is not a tax advisor; actual results depend on your lots, your bracket and your other holdings.
This is the short version. The full explanation — with an interactive ownership visual and a tax demonstrator you can run against your own portfolio size — lives on the strategies page. Bull Run is not a tax advisor; talk to yours before acting on any of it.
You have read the case. Now hear it.
Everything above is the argument on paper. Below it is the same argument told out loud, chapter by chapter, in the portfolio manager’s own words — what the strategy owns, why those businesses, how it behaves in a decline, and what it costs.
Eleven narrated chapters per strategy. Choose Quick Tour for the shape of it, or Full Detail for the whole argument including fees. The player runs on the same live database as this page, so the numbers you hear are the numbers you just read.
Loading the player…
Built through a boom, a violent reset, and an infrastructure cycle.
This is the one section that is different on every strategy page. Growth, Core and Low Volatility each lived through something else. Innovation lived through the widest swing of the four, and the honest version of that is more persuasive than a highlight reel.
The strategy goes live.
Innovation begins live management on March 24, 2020, as markets absorb COVID, zero-rate policy and a sudden acceleration in digital demand.
Growth gets repriced upward.
Investors pay aggressively for software and secular growth. Strong fundamentals and expanding valuation multiples work in the same direction for once.
The reset is violent.
Rates rise sharply and long-duration growth assets reprice. Innovation experiences a calendar-year decline greater than 65% — a risk fact that belongs in the story, not buried in the disclosures.
The engine changes.
The case becomes less about multiple expansion and more about revenue growth, margins, earnings power and stock selection doing the work.
Infrastructure becomes the story.
AI compute, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and fintech form the current opportunity set — through the same 25% growth gate that has always applied.
Both series gross of advisory fees; ARKW’s return is net of its own expense ratio. A high correlation is the point — it says the comparison is fair, not that the results are the same.
When valuations sit near the long-run average, you stop paying for the story and start paying for the growth itself.
We compounded at — a year while the price of our own asset class fell —.
Two unusual things happened at once, and they pulled in opposite directions.
Software valuations went through the sharpest repricing this asset class has seen since the dot-com bust. What investors paid for a dollar of forward revenue went from — at the peak in — to — now — a decline of —. Innovation went live — and owned that repricing the entire way down.
At the same time the S&P 500 ran — a year. Only — six-year windows since 1926 have ever compounded faster. Its long-run average over that whole history is —.
So the comparison people reach for was drawn at the worst possible moment for us and close to the best possible moment for the index — and across it we finished — a year apart. None of that — came from paying more for the same revenue. It came from revenue growth and from which companies we owned.
What we think happens from here. Multiple expansion is a tailwind we have not spent — at — there is very little left to give back, and a return toward the longer-run range would be additional rather than required. We expect to keep compounding near the rate we just did, because the engine that produced it — revenue growth above 25% and stock selection — does not depend on valuations recovering. We also expect the S&P to spend more time near its — long-run average than near the — it just delivered. If both of those hold, the gap runs the other way — by roughly — a year.
That is our view, not a promise, and you should not have to take it on faith. The next panel hands you the assumptions — set the growth rate and the multiple wherever you think they belong and watch the arithmetic.
Run your own numbersSize is the structural difference.
ARK manages billions across thousands of holders. Bull Run manages tens of millions in this strategy. In our view that is an advantage in concentrated growth investing — positions move in and out without moving the market, and the portfolio can own mid-cap compounders a multi-billion-dollar fund practically cannot. That is a belief about capacity, not a guarantee, and it is the reason we would rather run this strategy small.
One person, every decision.
No committee, no outside model provider, no third-party strategist. That concentration of judgment is why the portfolio can look nothing like an index — and it is a genuine key-person risk, which is why we name it here rather than let you discover it later.
Project it yourself.
Two things drive a return like this: how fast the companies grow their revenue, and whether the market pays a different multiple for that revenue at the end than it does today. Set both and watch the arithmetic. The defaults are live — the book’s current weighted growth estimate and the latest published median multiple.
Hypothetical illustration, gross of fees — not a prediction and not a projection of actual performance. The portfolio’s holdings are not the software index the median multiple describes, so treat this as the mechanics — revenue growth compounding, plus or minus a re-rating — rather than a model of this portfolio. Actual results will differ.
Every position, every weight, nothing rounded away.
This is the actual model book, read live from the same database that drives the performance figures above — including the two line items that are not ordinary common stock, which are labelled rather than buried.
Model holdings
Loading…Growth against gross margin.
Bubble size is position weight. Forward revenue growth is the consensus estimate for the next fiscal year — not a trailing figure, which for these companies reads very differently.
Sector exposure.
Start with thousands of companies. Finish with about twenty.
The same five stages run on all four Bull Run strategies. Only the thresholds move — Innovation sets them at the aggressive end, which is what makes it the flagship and what makes it the most volatile.
Fish where the fish are.
Start top-down. Identify whole industries growing revenue 20–25% a year. A company swimming against its own industry’s current is a much harder bet than one carried by it.
Apply the growth gate.
Inside those industries, screen for consensus forward revenue growth above 25%. This is a filter, not a verdict — it decides which companies get researched, nothing more.
Read the business.
Gross margin, unit economics, competitive position, balance sheet, reinvestment runway, and who actually buys the product. Done one company at a time, with no shortcuts.
Then argue about price.
A great business at an indefensible multiple is still a bad investment. 2022 was the expensive lesson in that, and it changed how much the portfolio will pay for a given growth rate.
Size it, then keep testing it.
Conviction sets the weight. Positions are held, trimmed or exited on evidence — a thesis that stops being supported gets closed, whether or not the position is profitable.
Why the number is 25%, and why the book stays small.
Set the gate lower and the portfolio drifts toward being an expensive index fund. Set it higher and there are not enough companies left to build anything you could responsibly own. Twenty-five per cent forward growth leaves a pond of a few dozen credible names across the whole market — small enough that one person can genuinely know all of them, which is the entire operating premise of this firm.
Every name enters through the same five stages regardless of strategy. The full research process is described on the investment approach page.
Direct ownership, one published fee, institutional plumbing.
This section is identical on every Bull Run strategy page. The portfolio changes; the custody arrangement, the tax mechanics, the fee schedule and the way an advisor accesses the strategy do not.
What you get, structurally.
Everything below follows from holding the securities directly rather than through a pooled vehicle.
Opened at Charles Schwab under your registration. You keep your own login, your own statements, and the ability to see every position on any given day.
Individual lots mean losses can be harvested position by position, gifts can be made in appreciated shares, and a concentrated legacy holding can often be transitioned in rather than sold.
A company you will not own, an employer’s stock you are already heavy in, a sector you want left alone — these are instructions we can honour, because the account is yours.
There is no pool. Another investor leaving cannot create a taxable event inside your account.
Bull Run is compensated by its clients and by nobody else. No commissions, no revenue sharing, no product sales.
The fee schedule.
Charged quarterly in arrears on the average daily balance. Your tier is set by household assets under management.
Getting started.
Three things from you, in this order, before anything is managed.
About five minutes. It is what makes the first conversation useful rather than generic.
Ten to fifteen minutes, and it produces the allocation we start from — including how much Innovation, if any, belongs in your household.
With the person who manages the money. After that we build the portfolio proposal and send it to you.
The three questions we get every time.
It is concentrated, and that is the design rather than an oversight. Diversification is a property of your whole household, not of one sleeve. Innovation is meant to be a slice of a larger allocation — in our own risk models it never exceeds half of even the most aggressive profile, and for most households it is far less than that. If someone put their entire net worth in this strategy, we would tell them not to.
That is a real risk and we would rather name it than let you find it. One manager making every decision is why the portfolio can look nothing like an index; it is also a single point of failure. What exists against it: every position sits in your own account at Schwab, so nothing is locked up or gated; the research process is written down rather than held in one head; and you can move, liquidate or hand the account to another adviser at any time without our involvement.
Sometimes you shouldn’t. If you want market exposure at the lowest possible cost, an index fund is the correct answer and we will say so. What the fee buys here is an actively selected, concentrated portfolio held directly in your name, with the tax control that structure makes possible, and a manager you can call. Judge it the way you would judge any expense — against what it returned net of itself, which is exactly what the net toggle on this page is for.
For financial advisors.
Bull Run is approved on the Charles Schwab Managed Account Marketplace, so an advisor can allocate to this strategy inside an existing Schwab relationship without moving the client anywhere. Your client stays your client — you keep the relationship and the planning, and Bull Run manages the sleeve. Marketplace approval is a distribution arrangement; Schwab does not audit or publish these returns, and we would rather say that plainly than let it be assumed.
Everything you would need to check this yourself.
No gated PDF maze and no form standing between you and the numbers. The diligence stack sits here, in the open, including the raw return series this page is computed from.
Equity Innovation fact sheet
The full sheet, computed live rather than printed quarterly — gross and net, backtested and live, with the holdings and the calendar-year table.
Full performance record
All four strategies, every window, side by side against their benchmarks, with the risk statistics underneath.
How every name is chosen
The research process in full: where the search starts, what the thresholds are, how positions get sized, and what causes an exit.
Strategy backtester
Build your own blend across the four strategies and see what it would have done, with fees and taxes modelled.
Wealth forecaster
Project a household balance forward under different allocations, contribution schedules and fee assumptions.
Form ADV and disclosures
Bull Run Investment Management, LLC — CRD #306763. Filings, brochure and disclosure history through the SEC’s public adviser search.
The daily return series is public.
Every figure on this page is computed in your browser from one spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet is open. Download it, rebuild the arithmetic yourself, and check whether the numbers we publish are the numbers the data supports. Most firms will not hand you that; we would rather you verify than take our word for it.
Innovation is the most aggressive of four.
Almost nobody should hold this strategy on its own. It is built to sit alongside the others, in a proportion that matches what a household can actually sit through.
Equity Innovation
The fastest-growing public companies we can find, concentrated and conviction-weighted. The most upside we run and the deepest declines.
You are hereEquity Growth
The same companies Innovation looks for, one stage later — still growing well above the market, with a steadier ride. Also where a name lands when it got away from us early and earned its place anyway.
Enter the Growth page →Equity Core
The index with the low-quality names removed. Core moves with the market rather than away from it — it has simply delivered more of the move, in both directions.
Enter the Core page →Equity Low Volatility
The ballast. You are buying a smoother line, not a higher one. Its real job is to make the rest possible — it is what lets someone hold more Innovation than they could otherwise sit through.
Enter the Low Volatility page →Find out whether Innovation belongs in your portfolio — and how much.
The honest answer for a lot of households is a smaller allocation than they first want, and for some it is none. That is a conversation, not a form. Start with the intake, or book time directly with the person who manages the money.
Performance methodology
Performance is computed in the browser from Bull Run’s published daily return series. Returns before the live inception date are backtested and do not represent actual trading; backtested results benefit from hindsight in strategy construction and carry no execution, liquidity or timing costs.
Figures are shown gross of advisory fees unless a net view is selected. Net figures deduct the modeled advisory fee from the strategy only; benchmark returns are always shown gross. Actual client results differ based on timing of contributions, tax circumstances, restrictions and the fee tier applied.
Risk and holdings
Equity Innovation is a concentrated, aggressive equity strategy and involves substantial risk, including the permanent loss of capital. Its record includes declines of more than a third on more than one occasion. It holds a leveraged exchange-traded note and a digital asset, both of which increase volatility. No guarantee is made that the strategy will meet its objective.
Holdings shown are the model portfolio and are subject to change without notice. Individual accounts may differ. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or individualized investment advice.
Regulatory
Bull Run Investment Management, LLC is a fee-only Registered Investment Adviser, CRD #306763, state-registered in CA, DC, FL, MD, NC, TX and VA. Registration does not imply any level of skill or training. Bull Run is approved on the Charles Schwab Managed Account Marketplace; that is a distribution arrangement and Schwab neither audits nor publishes these returns.
The full-cycle return objective is a long-term target, not a promise, forecast or guarantee. Bull Run does not provide tax or legal advice. This page is for informational purposes only.
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General information from this website only — not advice and not a recommendation. Past performance does not predict future results.