BNP Paribas Investment Partners is adding a new fundamental active world equity fund, Parvest Equity Best Selection World, to its flagship Parvest umbrella fund. The fund is managed by its highly experienced Global Equity team that joined in February and is led by Simon Roberts.
Parvest Equity Best Selection World is a high conviction stock picking fund managed using an unconstrained long-only strategy with an absolute return philosophy. The portfolio consists of the fund managers’ top stock picks and is highly concentrated, with a maximum of 40 names. It is not benchmark-constrained and has a high active share of close to 90%, and is expected to have a tracking error in the range of 4-8%1.
The investment team seeks to identify companies based in Europe, the USA, Japan and Emerging Markets, which have strong compounding growth potential that has been underestimated by the market, or where companies are undergoing significant restructuring by reducing their asset base and therefore leading to increased and sustainable profitability.
Parvest Equity Best Selection World combines a proprietary quantitative screening process that identifies a universe of stocks with attractive financial characteristics with fundamental analysis to identify and invest in stocks with an expected risk-adjusted absolute annualised Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of at least 20%. Position sizes will be consistent with the expected IRR at any time and this approach is also a major part of the sell discipline. The fund follows a long-term investment approach, resulting in low turnover. It is expected that much of the alpha will be sourced from stock selection across sectors and that there will be no intentional style bias through time, which should enable it to perform in different market conditions.
Guy Davies, Director of Equities at BNP Paribas Investment Partners, comments: “We are pleased to announce the launch of Parvest Equity Best Selection World, managed by our recently-appointed global equity team. The team members average more than 20 years’ industry experience and have worked together for many years. They have a strong and demonstrable investment record, and being able to offer our clients this capability is a further step in our strategy of developing a world class equity proposition.”