Skandia International beefs up its emerging market offering

Skandia International has added two new Dublin-based emerging market funds to its offshore ranges.

Both funds are Dublin-based vehicles available in Sterling, Dollar and Euro, and are managed by Skandia Investment Group (SIG).
 
The Skandia Local Currency Emerging Market Debt fund has been designed to take advantage of the longer term prospects for currencies and bonds in a wide range of emerging economies.
 
SIG awarded the mandate for this new fund to the US based institutional fixed-income investment specialist Stone Harbor Investment Partners, which already runs the Skandia Emerging Market Debt fund.
 
According to SIG, the rationale for the new fund was three-fold in that emerging market debt (EMD) was a good way to capture global growth with emerging markets having good relative yields; that local currencies were still under valued and that local currency EMD was an established market – some three times the size of the US dollar EMD.
 
The second offering is the Skandia Global Emerging Markets fund, run by Fisher Investments, a US-based global and emerging markets specialist.
 
Fisher Investments, founded in 1979 by Ken Fisher – a Forbes investment columnist and son of the legendary growth investor Phil Fisher – is a large, well resourced private investment firm with over $35bn of assets under management.
 
SIG believes that Fisher’s unique, top-down investment approach gives them a competitive advantage in the management of emerging market equities. This is based on SIG’s view that macro and trend analysis are key elements in the decision-making process when investing in emerging markets. Through a combination of their experience and a well structured process, Fisher is able to effectively link themes with country, sector and stock-level decisions to deliver excess returns.
 
24.45% of investments in this $92m fund are in Republic of Korea, 17.5% in Brazil and 12.08% in China with the rest spread across a range of other countries including Mexico, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
 
Phil Oxenham, marketing manager at Skandia International said ‘The demand we have been witnessing for emerging market solutions has been consistently high and growing over the past twelve months. We are delighted to be extending our fund ranges to include these two funds from such highly commended and exclusive asset managers."

Oxenham added: Some advisers like to research and select funds themselves but increasingly advisers are looking to focus more on their clients’ financial planning needs and outsource elements of their investment service.  Advisers can utilise the huge resources and expertise of SIG’s global investment research team to indentify the best fund managers in each investment sector and to continuously monitor their performance, ensuring that each appointed manager meets, and exceeds, our clients’ expectations.’