Lazard today announced the launch of a new fund that will invest in mispriced US small cap companies.
The Lazard US Small Cap Equity fund will be managed by Oren Shiran, who joined Lazard when the company he co-founded, Baylight Capital, was acquired in 2019.
He currently manages the Lazard US Systematic Small Cap Equity fund alongside deputy managers Stefan Tang and Seavan Sternheim, which has not been available to buy in the UK.
It generated a total return of 11.9% since launching in 2015, which was 5 percentage points higher than the Russell 2000 index that is aims to beat.
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Shrian said that the cheap valuations in the US small cap market make it an “exceptionally fertile” time to capture mispriced opportunities.
He and his team designed a quantitative model at their former firm that identifies and exploits persistent inefficiencies in company valuations, allowing them to scan the market daily for pricing anomalies.
“We’ve created an investment process designed to address the age-old problem of scale in small caps, solving complex financial analysis by applying accumulated domain knowledge to a vast amount of data in real time,” he added.
“Our automated fundamental analysts are not black boxes. They’ve been developed over 10 years to replicate a labour-intensive rigorous process, at scale, to drive returns.”
The Lazard US Systematic Small Cap Equity fund has just under 400 holdings, and this new portfolio will invest in a minimum of 350 companies.
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