The Threadneedle (Lux) US Contrarian Core Equities Fund fund was officially opened to investors on 12 October and is run by Pope and his team, including associate portfolio manager Harvey Liu, along the same lines as the $1.6bn Columbia Management Contrarian Core Fund which looks to out-of-favour income and growth stocks. He has run this predominantly large cap strategy for the past seven years and is now available in Europe, the UK and Asia through the Threadneedle Luxembourg Sicav.
Pope commented: “This fund is all about pessimism – we are looking for those companies that have fallen out of favour due to undue pessimism about their future. By taking a bottom-up approach to finding these stocks we can identify those unfavoured companies with the best upside potential in order to generate alpha for clients.
“In the current market, many stocks are trading within the bottom third of their 52-week price range and so I currently have a very large universe in which to invest and we are uncovering some very good opportunities.”
The fund is benchmarked against the S&P 500 and has an institutional annual management fee of 0.8%, compared to 1.5% for the retail version.
