Allianz US Large Cap Value: opportunities in US equities beyond the magnificent seven

Value and US equities are not always words that fit well together, but James Dorment and the US Large Cap Value team at Voya Investments, supplemented by their focus on Excess Capital Yield, have been able to outperform the Russell 1000, net of fees, by c.200bps per annum since 2008. Jim will provide insight into his team’s approach to investing in this part of the US market and discuss why they feel positive about its prospects going forward.

Capturing Climate Transition Opportunities in Global Equities

Allspring believes ‘leaving returns on the table’ is a common misconception in climate equity investing. Their approach seeks to delivers both financial and climate outcomes in a core global equity portfolio. Peter Weidner will discuss how they drive alpha using their innovative bottom-up stock selection approach that blends quantitative tools and fundamental insights to amplify their ability to consistently select winning stocks. Identifying climate transition winners does not necessarily mean low carbon companies today, but companies that will win in a low carbon world of tomorrow. The goal is to build a resilient all-star portfolio of stocks that play well together, not just a portfolio of all-stars and they will discuss looking beyond traditional models to prevent compromising returns to invest in Climate Transition Global Equity.

IG Credit – making every basis point count

Coolabah (est. 2011 with +6bn USD in FUM) are cash bonds experts - playing mean reversion in IG credit through active trading and in-depth fundamental research.

Price discovery in OTC credit remains opaque (like stocks before exchanges existed). Coolabah’s unique process exploits mispricing in the highest quality, most liquid investment-grade bonds in order to generate excess returns primarily through spread compression as opposed to duration or carry.

Morgan Stanley Global Macro Fund: Diversification and consistent excess returns from non-traditional sources

A Macro fund that has been long foreign currencies vs USD and short credit spreads for the last 5 years and still generated a 0.5 Sharpe ratio. How can that be?! With a strategy launched in 1996 from non-traditional beginnings, Global Macro seeks to generate alpha primarily from long and short sovereign positions across currencies, sovereign credit, and interest rates. During the session Kyle Lee will tell the story of how New Zealand’s big-bang reforms in the late 1980s started it all, as well as highlight how investors have used the fund to diversify portfolios from traditional stock and bond allocations and deliver consistent risk-adjusted returns.

High-Conviction Global Equity: The Alpha Blueprint

Join Rob Hinchliffe, PineBridge Investments Global Focus Equity Portfolio Manager, to learn how a non-consensus approach leads to a highly differentiated, quality-focused portfolio. Global Focus Equity seeks to generate its alpha from stock-specific sources, avoiding sector, style, and other top-down macro tilts. The result is a concentrated portfolio paradoxically high in active share and low in benchmark risk, with a robust track record through widely ranging market conditions.

Are we in an opportunity sweet spot for European value stocks?

Since the start of the year European investors’ expectations of a more dovish ECB have boosted growth names at the expense of value with the MSCI Europe ex UK Growth index nearly matching the year to date returns of the top-heavy MSCI USA equivalent. This extreme performance divergence has resulted in a valuation gap of nearly 14x between the Growth and Value indices, with the former trading roughly 40% above its 20-year median, while European value stocks are currently cheaper than their historical average. Matt Ring, a co-portfolio manager on Pzena’s Europe ex-UK Focused Value UCITS, will discuss how today’s backdrop is skewed in favour of value, and how they’re discovering many high-quality franchises trading at highly discounted valuations.

Enhanced Indexing: a smart approach to capturing the equity risk premium

One of the significant shifts in recent decades has been the rise of passive solutions. Despite their indisputable merits, including low costs and transparency, they face challenges such as lagging behind benchmarks net of costs, being prone to arbitrage, and lacking flexibility. In this session, Wilma de Groot will introduce the compelling alternative of Enhanced Indexing for capturing the equity risk premium by blending the benefits of passive and active investing. Wilma will discuss how this time-tested approach focuses on stable excess returns and limited relative risk, as well as provide insight into how it is successfully being implemented.

Risk factor diversification within high active share portfolios

Scott Weber, Vaughan Nelson’s Lead Senior Portfolio Manager, will introduce the Select strategy and Vaughan Nelson’s approach to risk factor diversification within high active share, concentrated portfolios. Vaughan Nelson employs a fundamental, research driven approach to high active share, concentrated portfolios. As part of the portfolio construction process, risk factors are considered and neutralised in an effort isolate return generation via security selection. Today, the result is a portfolio with 25-30 holdings with greater risk factor diversification than the S&P 500 while demonstrating long term outperformance through cycle.