European Smaller Companies Fund strong 3-year performance
Standard Life Investments, the global fund manager, today announced that its European Smaller Companies SICAV Fund is celebrating the third anniversary of its launch.
Aimed at European institutional and retail investors, the Fund was launched on 27 September 2007 and has produced top decile performance over three years, outperforming its sector by more than 24% since launch. The Fund is also top decile over two years and well above median over the last 12 months.
Structured as a sub-fund forming part of Standard Life Investments' Luxembourg-domiciled SICAV range, the euros 57.8m Fund invests in a diversified European smaller companies portfolio of 40 to 60 ‘highest conviction' stock ideas. It is a high alpha, unconstrained, actively managed fund which takes a purely bottom-up approach to stock selection.
The fund is managed by Ken Nicholson, who has over 11 years' experience of investing in smaller companies stocks with Standard Life Investments and 23 years' experience in the investment industry. Ken has built up an impressive performance track record in both ‘high alpha' and ‘core' style investing.
Phil Barker, Head of Pan European Sales, Standard Life Investments, said: "Our reputation as a leading investment manager is based on the exceptional quality of our people. Ken works within a smaller companies team which is both experienced and well resourced, with over 62 years of combined small-cap experience. Together the team manages a number of mandates with a total value of euros 1.5 billion.
"Our key competitive advantages are this experienced, stable team, and our proven, repeatable and transparent investment process. This critical combination has helped the fund deliver strong outperformance since its launch three years ago. It has also led to a great deal of interest from investors this year, most notably leading to a recent win from a well-known German institutional client."
Ken Nicholson, Fund Manager of the European Smaller Companies Fund, Standard Life Investments, said: "The strong outperformance of the Fund since launch has demonstrated the resilience of our core small cap process and its ability to perform in all market conditions. While I remain very excited about the prospects for the companies already in the portfolio I am always open to finding the next great small company. That is what is so exciting about investing in this asset class.
"The outlook for the sector is very promising with valuations generally reasonable and the outlook for corporate earnings improving. Given this backdrop, I'm convinced that a hand-picked quality portfolio, such as ours, of well-financed, fast-growing European smaller companies remains an attractive investment proposition right now."
Standard Life Investments' SICAV offering provides investors with access to a number of sub-funds across a diverse range of geographies and sectors in both equities and bonds (see notes to editors). The funds have public distribution status in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and The United Kingdom.