Highly regarded value investor Starboard Value has around $5.2 billion in managed equities, so the amount held in these three stocks represents slightly more than 18% of its holdings. It's a significant figure and implies a high level of belief in infrastructure consultancy AECOM (NYSE: ACM), application software company Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK), and data center equipment company Vertiv (NYSE: VRT). Here's why all three are interesting.

Starboard's investments follow a common theme. In a nutshell, it's a variant of value investing whereby Starboard finds companies whose operational performance lags behind its peers. The principle is that the company has an opportunity, potentially abetted by Starboard's activism, to improve its performance in line with its peers. 

That's the playbook Starboard followed with AECOM, and it has paid off. Following a series of divestitures, AECOM refocused its business on infrastructure and reduced the regions and activities it operated in. 

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Source Fool.com