The Board of Trustees of The Royce Fund have approved a name change, effective 1 May, 2015, with the Royce Opportunity Select Fund becoming the Royce Micro-Cap Opportunity Fund.
The renamed fund will operate under a new non-fundamental investment policy requiring 80 per cent of its assets to be invested in stocks with market caps up to USD1 billion. The Fund will be run closely to the way in which it has been since its inception, investing primarily in a limited number (generally less than 100) of mostly micro-cap stocks. William A Hench continues to manage the Fund, assisted by Boniface A Zaino. However, the Fund will no longer have the ability to engage in short selling, write call options, or borrow money for investment purposes. The Fund has not used these investment capabilities to any significant extent in recent years.
Hench and Zaino will continue to seek what they believe are opportunistic situations for undervalued securities. Such opportunistic situations may include turnarounds, emerging growth companies with interrupted earnings patterns, companies with unrecognised asset values, or undervalued growth companies. This theme-based, opportunistic value approach is the same approach that has always been used for the long portion of the portfolio.
