Swiss & Global debuts actively managed Julius Baer Smart Equity ETF range

Jun 26th, 2012 | By | Category: Equities

Swiss & Global Asset Management, manager of the Julius Baer range of funds, has added a series of Julius Baer Smart Equity ETFs to its investment fund range. The Zurich-headquartered company is among the first fund managers in Europe to give investors access to actively managed equity portfolios in an ETF format.

Swiss & Global debuts actively managed Julius Baer Smart Equity ETF range

Zurich-based Swiss & Global Asset Management has launched four actively managed Julius Baer Smart Equity ETFs.

The Julius Baer Smart ETFs will be listed on the Deutsche Boerse in Frankfurt and offer global, emerging market, European and Asian exposure.  The ETF range comprises four funds:

JB Smart Equity ETF World / EUR
JB Smart Equity ETF Emerging Markets / EUR
JB Smart Equity ETF Europe / EUR
JB Smart Equity ETF Asia / EUR

Each Julius Baer Smart Equity ETF holds up to 200 positions and combines the advantages of conventional exchange traded funds – transparency, cost efficiency and liquidity – with the potential advantages of an active investment strategy.

The ETFs use a systematic approach to invest in selected equities from their respective MSCI benchmarks, with each position subject to a qualitative check before implementation.

The funds aim to outperform their benchmarks by combining two proprietary systematic strategies in one portfolio to effectively exploit price trends and valuation anomalies.

The systematic trend approach focuses on investment opportunities driven by the behaviour of investors. It exploits short and medium-term price anomalies by identifying trends and trend reversals based on technical indicators. The stocks are equally weighted.

The systematic value approach focuses on stock valuation. It identifies and exploits price anomalies on the basis of medium and long-term valuation parameters. The stocks are weighted by market capitalisation.

The higher the risk-adjusted return as measured by the ex-post information ratio, the higher the respective pool’s weight in the fund.

Commenting on the launch, Stefan Angele, Head of Investment Management at Swiss & Global Asset Management, said: “Swiss & Global is a dedicated active manager. These new products capitalise on our proven twenty-year track record in systematic stock picking and combine this expertise with the advantages of exchange traded products. This enables us to offer the transparent and liquid products many investors seek, at the same time eliminating some of the obvious weaknesses of purely passive index replication. ETFs have witnessed significant growth and have become an important part of the fund industry in recent years, so we feel that this major product innovation closes a gap in the European fund offering.”

Stefan Fröhlich, lead fund manager of the Julius Baer Smart Equity ETFs at Swiss & Global, added: “The aim of our active strategy is to avoid and at the same time exploit the typical human errors in the investment process. These include temporary overreactions and the strong herd instinct of many investors. We select the stocks in a very systematic way based on strict rules that we have developed over a number of years. In addition, every position is also subject to a qualitative check by an experienced portfolio manager before implementation. For the first time we are now in a position to offer investors access to our investment expertise in the form of ETFs.”

The funds are UCITS IV compliant, fully invested in equities and do not use derivatives or undertake securities lending. They each have a management fee of 0.45%.

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