Finding the best ideas to win
Focusing on the best ideas and staying index unaware led the ClearBridge RARE Infrastructure Income fund to win the top spot in the Infrastructure Securities – Currency Hedged at this year’s 2021 Money Management’s Fund Manager of the Year’s award.
ClearBridge Investments’ managing directors and portfolio managers, Shane Hurst and Charles Hamieh, said the ability to construct their own portfolio and be free from benchmarks was a key differentiating factor.
“I think the point we made right from the start is we are index unaware which means we construct our universe and what that means is we are able to have very different views on companies, different top 10s, different portfolio than other indices and other managers,” they said.
“We have a focus very much on the risk and return profiles, a risk profile is something that some managers do not focus enough on. We also have a very integrated environmental, social, governance (ESG) process which uses our proprietary knowledge to integrate ESG factors into our decision making. But really, it is about our ability to not have to use the benchmarks and just pick the best ideas that hopefully go into the strategy.”
The managers also stressed that the fund had been able to provide consistent results for more than 15 years which remained resilient through any cycle.
The judges also highly commended the ATLAS Infrastructure Australian Feeder Hedged fund in the same category for its appealing investment strategy with a clear philosophy, followed by a disciplined process and an attractive business structure.
The fund, which aimed to provide investors with exposure to a selection of high-quality infrastructure equities, applied a high conviction approach that focused on investing in only those high-quality listed infrastructure assets which provided the best risk/return characteristics.
The approach also concentrated on the underlying long-term cashflows of these companies through analysis of their component assets, adopting a private markets approach to modelling investment returns.
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