Domiciled in Ireland, the Liontrust GF European Smaller Companies Fund will be registered for sale in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Guernsey and Finland.
Managed by James Inglis-Jones and Samantha Gleave of the Liontrust Cashflow Solution Team, it is expected to have the majority of assets invested in companies with a market capitalisation of less than €5bn (£4.3bn, $5.4bn) at inception and is benchmarked against the MSCI Europe Small Cap Index.
Intelligent use of capital
Inglis-Jones and Gleave have been running institutional European Small Cap mandates for a combined total of more than seven years.
The GF European Smaller Companies Fund has been launched to make this strategy widely available for the first time.
The fund invests in companies that generate strong cash returns from their capital, appear cheap on those cash flows, and are run by managers committed to an intelligent use of capital.
It avoids companies run by aggressive company managers making large cash investments to chase their growth forecasts.
Proprietary research
Inglis-Jones and Gleave do not speak to brokers or read their research and do not meet company managers. Instead, they focus purely on bottom-up financial analysis, relying on their own research and thus removing any emotional bias towards portfolio holdings.
All the stocks in the portfolio are equally weighted because Inglis-Jones and Gleave believe it is absolute, and not relative, returns and risk that investors should focus on.