JPMorgan US Smaller Companies (JUSC) offers investors a portfolio of small-cap US equities, with a process that places great weight on the quality of a company and the strength of its management team. JUSC benefits from the expertise of its strong team of four dedicated investment professionals, with its lead manager, Don San Jose, having 24 years of experience. The team’s focus on quality means that they will typically forgo zero-earning stocks, binary growth stocks or so-called ‘meme’ stocks. Instead, they prefer companies with resilient business models and strong earnings, which can still remain on an upward growth trajectory. We cover the team’s process in more detail, and give examples of key holdings, in the Portfolio section. This focus on quality has been particularly pertinent recently, as much of the market is favouring low-quality value companies which were heavily sold off during the pandemic. Although JUSC has underperformed in the near term, its managers are happy to sit on the side-lines, patiently waiting for the eventual re-rating of companies with strong earnings. As we outline in our Performance section, the team’s process has served them well over the long term, given their outperformance against their benchmark, the Russell 2000 Index. JUSC currently trades on a 3.3% discount which is slightly wider than its long-term average, and likely the result of the headwinds that quality investing has faced recently. JUSC also has net gearing of 6.6%; while this is modest in absolute terms, it is still the highest level of any North American trust.