2026 Sohn Monaco – Janus Henderson’s Alison Porter Pitches 40+ Year Old Boston Firm As Machine Vision Play At The Heart of AI And Reshoring

At the 2026 Sohn Monaco Conference Alison Porter, Portfolio Manager on the Global Technology Leaders Team at Janus Henderson Investors opened up her presentation with some philosophy. With 30 years of financial industry experience and 12 years at Janus Henderson co-managing the Horizon Global Technology Leaders Fund, Porter arrived with a framework for reading technology markets and a single high-conviction name: a Boston-based machine vision specialist she believes the market is materially mispricing.

A Framework Built on the Hype Cycle

Porter opened not with a stock but with a theory. Technology investing, she argued, is unusually prone to waves of excess capital flooding into ideas that capture the imagination before they deliver real profitability. The pattern is predictable: hype, followed by disillusionment, followed eventually by genuine adoption. The investors who consistently make money are those who can read that arc rather than get swept up in it.

The Janus Henderson Horizon Global Technology Leaders Fund, which Porter co-manages, has delivered +1,922% cumulative returns since inception in July 2004, equivalent to roughly 19% per annum since inception and +22% per annum over the past 10 years. Porter attributed that record not to calling macro cycles but to a repeatable stock-selection discipline summarized in four criteria: room to grow, right to win, product innovation, and valuation discipline.

Room to grow means targeting companies with large and expanding addressable markets – not GDP-plus-one or two percent, but double-digit top-line growth. Right to win means the company must be the clear leader, not the third-best player in its category. Product innovation means the business consistently accelerates through new product cycles. Valuation discipline, the criterion Porter noted that technology investors least like to discuss, means anchoring to earnings and cash flow rather than reaching for DCF assumptions that can be manipulated by tweaking a discount rate.

The result, she said, is finding under-appreciated earnings power: companies where consensus earnings estimates sit materially below what the business is actually capable of generating.