Guided Architecture Fund Range Fund Spotlight
The M&G Global Emerging Markets Fund
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A key challenge for pension scheme trustees is to ensure that members are offered a full range of appropriate investment funds together with an appropriate default investment strategy.
At Irish Life Corporate Business (ILCB), our default Personal Lifestyle Strategy (PLS) along with our large range of funds from Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM), have proved popular with trustees and consultants in meeting this challenge.
In 2012, we worked with ILIM and Morningstar OBSR, an independent investment research and consultancy business with one of the largest and most experienced fund research teams in the UK market, to introduce the Guided Architecture Range of funds in order to further enhance the choices available to trustees, consultants and pension scheme members.
You can view the full Guided Architecture Range of funds by clicking here, but to give more information on the funds now available, we have decided to profile an individual fund each month, starting this month with the M&G Emerging Markets Fund.
This fund invests in a relatively small group of equities in emerging markets. An emerging market is a country whose economic or business activity is in the process of rapid growth. Examples of countries currently considered emerging markets include Brazil, Russia, India and China (often referred to as the BRICs).
The fund is managed using a long-term strategy that focuses on identifying companies that are improving their returns on capital or have the ability to sustain high returns for a long period of time. The fund’s portfolio is managed without reference to an index. However, for comparative purposes the fund is benchmarked against the MSCI Emerging Markets index.
The fund manager aims to maximise long-term total returns through investment in companies that are able to generate returns in excess of their cost of capital, with a management team capable of implementing an appropriate strategy to achieve this, and fundamental prospects that are undervalued by the market. As such the fund is very much bottom-up in approach and the manager does not take views on the economic cycle or political environment.
Since its launch in February 2009 (to the end of August 2013), the fund has delivered impressive absolute and relative returns for investors, outperforming its MSCI Emerging Markets benchmark by 2.04 percentage points annualised. Morningstar OBSR believe that the fund manager’s experience, alongside the support of deputy fund manager and the strength of the global equity team at M&G, make this fund a compelling offering for investors seeking exposure to emerging market equities.
For more details on the M&G Global Emerging Markets Fund, click here.
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