Royce Small-Cap Opportunity Invmt RYPNX Fund Analysis

Adjustments to Royce Small-Cap Opportunity’s and Royce Small-Cap’s management teams do not change their People, Process, or Parent Pillar ratings. Royce Investment Partners on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, named Brendan Hartman as the leader of the four-person team that has run Opportunity since the previous squad abruptly left for another firm in April 2021. The managers, which include James Harvey, James Stoeffel, and Kavitha Venkatraman, won’t change the consensus-based approach they use to research ideas and build and monitor the fund’s portfolio. Hartman, however, will serve as the final decision-maker when needed, the firm said. As part of the change, Hartman will no longer run Royce Micro-Cap, on which he has been a manager since May 2013. The change has had ripple effects through the Royce lineup. Stoeffel, who has run the Micro-Cap fund with Hartman since May 2015, will become its lead manager and relinquish his portion of Royce Small-Cap, where he has run a small micro-cap sleeve for the portfolio formerly known as Royce Pennsylvania Mutual since May 2017. Stoeffel’s share of the fund was the smallest of the seven managers who have run independent slices of the strategy, and each of those remaining six stock-pickers have tended to own liberal helpings of micro-caps in their sleeves. One of those managers, Andrew Palen, who has run some of Small-Cap since May 2018 and has been an assistant manager on Royce Premier since February 2022, will join Stoeffel as an assistant manager on Micro-Cap. The changes came on the same day that firm founder and longtime Small-Cap manager Chuck Royce officially retired after an extended transition period.