It earns an Above Average Parent rating.
Founded in 2001 in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Conestoga has grown steadily around its core strengths. Its flagship mutual fund, Conestoga Small Cap, launched in 2002. The firm has since branched out into micro-, smid-, and mid-cap equity products. Not everything has succeeded. The first mid-cap foray ended in 2014 as the team realized its main strengths at the time were in small-cap equities, but adding resources since then has enabled a return to the space—though as of mid-2024, the mid- and micro-cap strategies held only a fraction of the firm's $7.9 billion in total assets under management.
Yet, Conestoga is well positioned for its future. CIO Bob Mitchell, the employee-owned firm's largest shareholder, has cultivated a strong investment culture. The firm planned carefully for its few departures. All four of its equity strategies use variations of a proven approach focused on steadily growing, profitable, low-debt companies. Conestoga subsidizes its smaller strategies' growth with generous fee waivers on the mutual funds—and keeping those products going gives the investment team more opportunities to develop its members' research acumen and portfolio management skills. These traits are likely to make Conestoga a reliable smaller-cap equity manager for years to come.
United States