Deep dive into Quality

Fund managers often like to say that they invest in high quality companies.
At first glance, it appears they are stating the obvious. Who would want to invest in anything other than a quality company? Quality can be a generic term meaning something that is great or valuable, but in investment circles it has a more specific meaning. For a company to be classified as quality, it has to meet certain criteria. Whilst there is no fixed definition as to what those criteria are, there is broad agreement as to the attributes of a quality company.Developing the concept of Quality investing
Quality as an investing concept can be traced back to Benjamin Graham and his 1949 book The Intelligent Investor. The concept grew in popularity around the early 2000s following the bursting of the dot com bubble and other spectacular failures like Enron and WorldCom. 
Jeremy Grantham of asset management firm GMO is a strong proponent of quality investing. He focuses on the attributes of high return, stable return and low debt. These attributes of profitability, earnings stability and capital structure have become the basis of many quality investing strategies. (Novy-Marx, 2014)

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