PineBridge Investments has launched the PineBridge (AU) Global Focus Equity Fund, making its flagship product available to Australian wholesale investors.
According to PineBridge, the fund seeks to provide investors with capital appreciation and identify mispricing opportunities in high-quality companies to construct a portfolio with more consistent and diversified returns.
What differentiates the fund from others, the firm explained, is its strategy of analysing companies based on their “lifecycle” stage rather than sector or industry.
This, it said, provides a more accurate reading of a company’s potential relative to the market’s perception of it, resulting in a differentiated 30-50-stock portfolio that is high in active share and low in benchmark-relative risk.
“In a market characterised by return dispersion and elevated valuations, selectivity and risk management is more important than ever,” Rob Hinchliffe, portfolio manager and head of global sector cluster research, highlighted.
“The global focus equity team have consistently applied a non-consensus, high conviction active investment approach, which has resulted in low correlation to peers and a differentiated source of returns,” Hinchliffe said.
Expounding on this, PineBridge said that its lifecycle equity research framework identifies the evolution of companies, which typically occurs over the longer run.
“As the anticipated changes become visible to the market over time, valuations converge with fundamentals, delivering the opportunity that was identified at the time of the stock’s purchase,” the firm underscored.
These investment opportunities exist across the entire market spectrum and at every point in the economic cycle, PineBridge said, and as such, the team are agnostic towards style- and sector-based investing.
Clinton Grobler, head of Australia, added: “The launch of the PineBridge Global Focus Equity Fund marks a step change in PineBridge expanding Australian business.”
“I believe Global Focus Equity will strongly complement PineBridge’s existing product range in Australia, appealing to investors’ core global equity appetite via a differentiated lifecycle, high conviction approach, combined with disciplined benchmark aware risk management,” Grobler concluded.
