Latitude Investment Management has launched a second fund for CIO and founder Freddie Lait.
Called Latitude Global, the fund is billed as a high-conviction global equity portfolio, with 25-30 holdings, that uses a style-agnostic approach.
The fund soft-launched last September with seed money from Latitude IM partners but until now was only available to certain institutional investors. Since launch it has returned 16% compared with the FTSE All World’s returns of 13.8%.
Latitude Global will be similar to the global long–only segregated mandate the boutique has run for Witan Investment Trust since 2018 and have cross-over with the global equities portion of the existing multi-asset Latitude Horizon fund.
Lait (pictured) said the decision to market Latitude IM’s second fund more widely follows a period of “accelerated growth” for the business, having made several hires to its investment and operations teams recently.
The boutique was founded by Lait in 2016 after being spun-out of Odey Asset Management. Odey AM retains a stake in the business and eponymous founder Crispin Odey is an adviser to the firm.
Speaking to Portfolio Adviser for a video interview last December, Lait briefly touched on the global equity strategy but was adamant the firm would not launch additional products.
“We do believe that one of the key routes to outperformance in fund management is to have that focus and alignment with people working in the business,” Lait said, “so we have no desire to become a platform business and launch loads of other products and diversify our risk in that sense.”
All of Latitude IM’s partners have money in the Latitude Horizon fund and most of the staff have invested in it as well.
Focusing on a limited number of strategies “gives us a little bit more of a chance of outperformance so a little bit better for our clients and through the years, those little bits should add up,” Lait said. “So we’re very keen not to launch new products and to remain focused on the thing we do well.”
The Latitude Horizon fund currently has £185m in assets, according to Trustnet. Over one year it has returned 26.3%, nearly double the FO Mixed Asset – Flexible average return, and is up 18% on a three-year view versus the sector’s 11% gains.
See also: Freddie Lait: Fund managers have become hyper-focussed on ‘quality growth’
