Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management’s (DeAWM) DB Platinum CROCI Global Dividends fund has surpassed USD500 million in assets under management (AUM).
Across all DeAWM product wrappers, the Cash Return on Capital Invested (CROCI) sustainable dividends investments now have over USD2.35 billion in assets.
The combined AUM of the DB Platinum CROCI Global Dividends fund and the DB Platinum CROCI US Dividends fund now exceed USD600 million.
The first quarter of 2014 has seen consistent inflows into the CROCI fund range.
In the US, USD1.25 billion in the DWS Equity Dividend Fund is also being managed using the CROCI US Dividends Strategy.
Over the past 12 months (22 April 2013 to 22 April 2014) the DB Platinum CROCI Global Dividends fund has outperformed the MSCI World High Dividend Yield Index by 5.1 per cent, while the DB Platinum CROCI US Dividends fund has outperformed the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index by 6.8 per cent.
Francesco Curto, DeAWM’s global head of CROCI, says: “The CROCI process continues to identify real value in equity markets, which is why it is attracting increasing numbers of investors. On the dividend theme in particular, dividends should remain a key consideration for investors as CROCI shows that equity valuations are at fair-value levels, while real corporate revenue growth in markets such as the US continues to be weak.”
CROCI is a systematic proprietary equity valuation process that seeks to capture the performance of under-valued companies while avoiding over-valued stocks. The CROCI process involves the in-depth analysis of corporate data, with a series of adjustments applied to gain a true picture of corporate assets and liabilities, and by extension to measure real cash returns. CROCI produces an economic price-earnings-ratio for each company, which is a measure of the stock’s relative value. Portfolios of CROCI-filtered stocks can then be constructed which adhere to the CROCI principle of never buying an over-valued stock.
Each of the DB Platinum CROCI dividend funds provide exposure to a portfolio of equally-weighted stocks found to be most attractive based on their CROCI economic value measure, with additional filters used to exclude stocks with a low and/or unsustainable dividend yield. The result is a portfolio of higher yield ‘real value’ stocks. This differs from traditional equity dividend high yield strategies, which typically only examine yield, and therefore can lead to exposure to over-valued stocks.
