Brandes Investment Partners has launched the Brandes Emerging Markets Equity Fund, a mutual fund targeted to long-term investors seeking a disciplined, conservative approach that focuses on valuations and company fundamentals. The fund also seeks to provide an attractive dividend yield.
"We’ve been investing in emerging markets for nearly three decades using a disciplined, value-based approach," says Charles Brandes, CFA, founder of Brandes Investment Partners.
Gerardo Zamorano, CFA, Director – Investments of Brandes Investment Partners, adds: "At a time when money being invested in emerging markets primarily is chasing the promise of growth at large-cap companies, Brandes offers investors a value-based investment strategy. While promising growth opportunities may still exist, we focus exclusively on valuation, striving not to pay too high a price for the growth potential emerging markets provide. Despite recent strong returns in emerging markets as measured by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, we still see significant opportunity, in particular, among small- and mid-sized companies which receive less attention by analysts and are more often mispriced."
Another distinctive feature is the fund’s flexibility. It has the ability to overweight in an industry or country when large opportunities exist; have zero weight in a country or industry if there is no compelling opportunity; be more defensive than an index in country allocations; and invest in non-index companies.
Many investors add emerging market investments to their portfolio because they typically have been less correlated to developed markets, and therefore may help reduce the volatility of their returns.
The fund is managed by a highly experienced seven-member committee with an average of more than 16 years of industry experience. The committee is supported by 30 equity analysts and 16 research associates. The team has a long history of investing in even the most volatile of emerging market conditions.
