Litman Gregory Masters Funds has hired two new sub-advisers to the Litman Gregory Masters International Fund with Lazard Asset Management and Wellington Management joining the fund’s five current sub-advisers.
Each sub-adviser runs a concentrated portfolio consisting of their highest-conviction holdings.
Mark Little will be the portfolio manager from Lazard and Jean-Marc Berteaux will be the portfolio manager from Wellington. Litman Gregory believes these sub-advisers are an excellent fit for the Litman Gregory Masters Funds concept, and have the ability to generate superior performance over the long term while providing valuable diversification benefits relative to the fund’s current sub-advisors.
Each manager will represent 14 per cent to 15 per cent of the fund’s assets, a weighting equal to that managed by each of the fund’s five other sub-advisers.
Berteaux is a senior vice president and equity portfolio manager at Wellington Management and has been an investment professional at Wellington Management since 2001. He invests in non-US companies across the capital spectrum where his longer-term earnings growth expectations are significantly above consensus estimates.
“We believe that in Berteaux we are getting a great stock picker, a flexible thinker that can adapt to changing macro conditions while staying within his area of competency, and access to Wellington’s broad, well-researched non-US investment opportunity set,” says Litman Gregory senior research analyst Rajat Jain, who works with the fund’s co-managers, Ken Gregory and Jeremy DeGroot.
Little is the lead portfolio manager responsible for managing the segment of the international fund’s assets allocated to Lazard Asset Management. Little is a managing director, portfolio manager/analyst on the international strategic equity portfolio-management team at Lazard. He has been a portfolio manager of the Lazard International Strategic Equity Portfolio since that fund’s inception in October 2005.
“We have been doing due diligence on Little since 2006 and we have invested in his mutual fund portfolio for our private clients for several years. We believe that through Little we are accessing the highest-conviction international ideas from a well-resourced, high-quality research platform at Lazard,” Jain says.
