Mawer 13F (2026 Q1): A Global-Quality Book in Broad Retreat

"Boring is beautiful," in broad retreat

Mawer Investment Management, the Calgary-based firm whose unofficial motto is "be boring, make money," has built a global reputation on patient, low-turnover quality investing, owning durable, well-managed businesses around the world and holding them for the long term. Its 2026Q1 13F captures the US-listed portion of that global book, about $15.45 billion across 126 positions, anchored by exactly the kind of high-quality franchises the firm is known for. But the filing also tells a story of broad retreat: nearly every major position was trimmed, and reported value has fallen sharply from its peak.

The top holdings are a roll call of global quality: Alphabet at 6.07%, Microsoft at 5.55%, Amazon at 4.92%, Shell, Marsh & McLennan, Visa, Amphenol, Northrop Grumman, Waters, and Aon. These are durable, cash-generative businesses with strong competitive positions, the steady compounders a quality manager builds around.

A book being trimmed across the board

The defining feature of this quarter is the breadth of the reductions. Mawer cut Alphabet by 11% of shares, Microsoft by 12%, Amazon by 10%, Shell by 12%, Marsh & McLennan by 11%, Amphenol by 22%, Northrop Grumman by 19%, and Aon by 14%, while adding modestly only to Waters. When a famously low-turnover manager reduces nearly every large position at once, the cause is usually portfolio-level rather than stock-specific, the signature of net outflows requiring the firm to raise cash across the book rather than a change of view on any single business. The composition stayed intact; the book simply got smaller.

Reading the decline honestly

Reported US value fell 13.5% on the quarter and has dropped from roughly $22 billion at its 2024 peak to $15.45 billion now, a sustained, multi-quarter decline. Combined with the across-the-board share reductions, that pattern points clearly to persistent redemptions rather than market losses alone, money leaving the strategy, with the manager trimming proportionally to meet it. As with any flow-driven filing, this makes the asset total a poor guide to the firm's conviction; the more reliable signal is what it chose to keep, a still-intact core of global-quality compounders, and the one name it added to, Waters.

How to read a flow-pressured quality book

Mawer's filing is a useful case study in distinguishing flow-driven selling from conviction-driven selling. The near-uniform trimming across high-quality names that the firm clearly still believes in is the fingerprint of redemptions, not disenchantment, and reading it as bearish stock-by-stock signals would be a mistake. The durable signal is the unchanged shape of the portfolio: a global-quality book, broadly diversified across technology, energy, insurance brokerage, defense, and life-science tools, that the firm is shrinking proportionally rather than reshaping. For investors who follow quality managers for ideas, the composition remains a vetted list of global compounders, even as the asset base contracts. You can explore the full holdings, the position changes, and the longer history on the Mawer Investment Management filer page.