Singapore-based investment fund manager, Copper Basin Capital, has launched an investment platform that allows investors to invest in one, some or all the 11 GICS sectors comprising the MSCI All Country Asia Index (MSCI AC Asia Index).
The MSCI AC Asia Index, whose components and weights are selected and calculated by MSCI, is a well-known benchmark index used by sovereign wealth funds, pension plans, foundations, and other global institutional investors as a standard to measure investment manager performance for investments in Asia. The index tracks the performance of 12 Asian markets, namely, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
With the launch of the fund platform, institutional investors now have a readily available path to invest in the index either with a benchmark strategy by investing across the entire index or with an alpha generation strategy by investing in undervalued sectors.
The investment fund, MSCI AC Asia Index Sector Fund (MXAS), is constructed by taking the more than 1,200 large and mid-cap equity securities in the MSCI All Country Asia Index, segregating them into their respective GICS® sectors and then using those components for each sector sub-fund. The sector sub-funds represent each of the 11 GICS sectors, namely, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Energy, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Information Technology, Materials, Real Estate, Telecommunication Services, and Utilities.
“Home to 60 per cent of the world’s population and coupled with rapid urbanisation, Asia is poised for continued growth,” says Richard Astorga, Managing Director and Portfolio Manager for Copper Basin Capital Pte. Ltd. “As security markets become more efficient, it is a natural progression for index investment funds to emerge to allow investors the same low-cost access available in other parts of the world.”
