L-R: Julia Faurschou, reporter at Investment Adviser, Harvey Lewis, sales analyst, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and Richard Romer-Lee, managing director at Square Mile Investment Consulting & Research
A first time entrant into the 100 Club, the Morgan Stanley Global Brands fund launched in February 2003 with the aim of providing long-term capital appreciation through investment primarily in equity securities.
The portfolio is managed by a team that includes William Lock, Bruno Paulson, Christian Derold, Dirk Hoffmann-Becking, Nic Sochovsky, Vladimir Demine, Marcus Watson, Alex Gabriele and Richard Perrott.
The fund adopts a stockpicking approach and has a structural bias to higher-quality stocks in higher-quality sectors, and a relatively concentrated portfolio of currently 26 stocks, compared with the more than 1,600 in the MSCI World index.
According to the latest factsheet as of September 30, the strategy has a 49.2 per cent geographical weighting to the US, slightly below the index weighting. Meanwhile, the 25.6 per cent allocation to the UK is significantly higher than the 6.8 per cent geographical weighting in the benchmark.
In sector terms the fund also deviates from the index weightings, with the 54.2 per cent weighting to consumer staples significantly larger than the 10.7 per cent index allocation, while IT accounts for 24.1 per cent of the portfolio, the factsheet shows.
The top-10 holdings account for more than half the portfolio, at 59.3 per cent, including a number of well-known brand names such as Microsoft, Unilever, Nestle, and Visa.
What the judges say
The judges singled out this fund for consistent application of a style that has now spawned several imitators.
