PineBridge opens flagship fund to Aussie investors

US-based asset manager PineBridge Investments will offer its flagship PineBridge Global Focus Equity Fund to Australian institutional investors.

The strategy seeks out mispriced opportunities in high-quality companies, promising investors more consistent and diversified returns from the global equities market.

The fund analyses and delimits companies based on PineBridge’s unique ‘Lifecycle’ equity research framework rather than traditional sector or industry-based breakdowns.

According to PineBridge, this now 20-year-old methodology tracks the dynamic evolution of companies over a longer time horizon, evaluating companies based on their maturity and cyclicality.

“As portfolio managers wholly focused on deriving active risk from stock-specific sources, we simply think it gives us a more fine-tuned instrument for picking up on and isolating the mispricing opportunities that arise as companies evolve through time,” explained Rob Hinchliffe, portfolio manager and head of global sector cluster research at PineBridge.

“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,” PineBridge further noted.

This results in a differentiated portfolio that offers a risk profile similar to that of the benchmark, but with greater potential for outperformance.

The UCITS version of the fund was launched in 1999.

In the year to date, the fund (Class Y) has delivered 18.6% returns to investors, 2.6% above the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI).

The fund is primarily composed of information technology, industrials, healthcare, and financial stocks, with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and JPMorgan Chase & Co its top holdings.

Hinchliffe said his team have consistently applied a non-consensus, high conviction active investment approach, resulting in “low correlation to peers and a differentiated source of returns.”

Headquartered in New York, PineBridge and its affiliates oversee more than US$169 billion (AU$245 billion) in assets as at 30 June 2024.