Produits

Fidelity International, via Luxembourg, is launching a new climate impact fund leveraging the need for improved performance of existing commercial real estate buildings in Europe. Investment Officer sat down with Aymeric de Sérésin, Fidelity’s director of European real estate investments.

After a dramatic first half of the year where global high-yield bond funds lost 7.3 per cent of their value, the second half of last year saw a small gain of 1.4 per cent, in euro terms. The consensus among fund managers remains that despite recession fears, we will not see a wave of defaults in 2023 either. 

For this week’s Morningstar Top 5, we look at the best-performing funds investing in emerging market local currency bonds. These funds ended 2022 with a loss of 9.9 per cent, measured in dollars, or 4 per cent in euros. The outlook for this risky asset class does not seem favourable at first glance, although some fund managers say there are opportunities.

L’alimentation constitue une grande mégatendance, encore trop peu connue des investisseurs. « Nous sommes confrontés à une menace encore plus grande. »

Infrastructure has become one of the topics we pay frequent attention to. It’s remarkable how often it comes up. But of you think about it, the global need for infrastructure investment, the attention paid by the political classes, the importance of the asset for the pension manager have combined to make this once dusty-seeming topic seem of the highest importance. The fact that it has the allure of being inflation-resistant has brought additional attention in these troubled times.

Quality companies possess characteristics that investors usually warm to, but this was totally different in 2022. In every quarter, the MSCI World Quality index lagged behind the MSCI World index, and in every quarter a loss was collected.  On balance, it was lower-quality stocks that beat the market in 2022. A top five low-quality equity funds.

« Notre fonds vise une situation win-win. Nous recherchons de bons rendements financiers tout en faisant ce qui est bon pour l’avenir de la planète », déclarent Philippe Van Loock et Pieter Slegers, respectivement gestionnaire et analyste du fonds Econopolis Climate Fund.

« En un mot, notre fonds (d’actions) se concentre sur les deux ‘P’, planet et people », explique Van Loock. « Nous investissons donc dans des entreprises à même de contribuer à la réalisation des objectifs climatiques », ajoute Slegers. 

Among the top five actively managed mutual funds in the energy sector that are tracked by Morningstar, the BGF World Energy and NN (L) Energy funds stand out as top performers when considering the year-to-date performance of this type of funds.

M&G a déclaré qu’elle allait introduire un ensemble supplémentaire d’exclusions ESG pour son fonds M&G (Lux) Optimal Income géré par Richard Woolnough. 

M&G said it will introduce an additional set of ESG exclusions to its M&G (Lux) Optimal Income fund managed by Richard Woolnough.