Three fund selectors outline their strategies and themes for long-term investments

This Wednesday 13th of October RankiaPro Europe hosted its sixth Conference Call of 2021. It was quite interesting to hear about the strategies and insights of our three panelists while discussing the current situation of the supply chains, tapering and the current estate of the European Economy.

To discuss on the topic best themes for long-term investments, we had the pleasure of hosting three investment professionals whose expertise gave us an overview of the funds and investment market, what they are looking for their strategies at the moment, and what they expect in the future.

Ernst (nack) Knacke, Head Of Research at LeifBridge and Shard Capital, Laurent Bouin, Fund selector at ABN AMRO Investment Solutions, Florian Gröschl, Managing Partner at Absolute Return Consulting, touched on a broad range of factors that are likely to shape the investment landscape during these times.

"In impact investing you not only do, but also measure and create an impact for the planet"

"To deal with impact investing in public equities, you need to have a high conviction portfolio, quite a high concentration, 25 to 35 stocks, to have a better management. To be efficient you cannot be with 200 companies, you don't have time, you have to be efficient, so the high conviction portfolio has two interesting effects, enables the engagement, so you have a focus on your chosen companies, and you can have more concentration an a higher performance."

"For this type of portfolio you need to own your position for very long time, the length of investment must be between 5 and 10 years, you need to see the growth of the companies creating the impact"

Senior Fund Analyst at ABN AMRO Investment Solutions since March 2019, he has 30 years of experience in the financial markets and has been managing portfolios with a focus on absolute return and hedge funds. He started his career in 1992 at CPR Asset Management to become fund manager of various balanced and absolute return funds, then moved to Switzerland between 2005 and 2008 at EIM Group, a fund of Hedge Funds,  to be head of Long Only Department, and then came back to France to join ABN Amro and Neuflize OBC as a fund manager specialized in absolute return and hedge fund selection. He is graduated with a master in Economics, a DESS Finance and Masters in Finance from University of Aix Marseille III.

"Long term investing is a difficult concept because there are times of high volatility where you lose money as fast as you made it"

"The interesting thing about diversification is that is very hard to find. Where to find diversification, Corporate bond yields at record lows or negative, corporate bonds spreads are extremely tight, parts of the equity markets are very expensive, commodity prices have soared."

"The intelligent analysis via large amount of data via AI is expected to deliver different results compared to conventional systematic strategies"

"Our solution would be a fund that offers effective diversification, with correlations close to zero, with a demonstrable increase in Sharpe ratio. Multi award winning investment process, dynamic trading long and short on 60 global markets with highly liquid instruments provides the necessary flexibility. Use of powerful AI, more data and their in-depth analysis enable the identification of alternative trading opportunities. This makes the desired non-correlation possible".

Florian joined Absolute Return Consutling GmbH in 2011, started the absolute return fund of fund mahi546 in October 2012, became a member of  the board of ARC as Co-CEO and CIO in January 2013 and owns 50% of the company since May 2017. Before ARC he worked for LGT Bank Österreich AG and Bawag PSK Invest AG managing various Absolute Return and fixed income funds and portfolios. Florian holds a degree in International Finance from the Vienna University of Economics and Business and qualified as Certified Portfolio Manager in 2005.

"If there is one area with invest that we believe is significantly ahead of the game, that is that is online gaming. To give you some statistics around gaming, it was about 2 billion online gamers in 2015, and the number is expected to reach about 3 billion by 2023."

"It's unsurprising that all the big tech companies are already involved in the infrastructure or the distribution of gaming. If you think of Microsoft, it owns a very popular game called Minecraft, but it also has the Xbox, Apple has Apple Arcane, Alphabet owns a platform called Stadia, and Facebook the Oculus platform."

"To conclude, you have a growing number of users or a growing number of gamers, you have secondly these user base that is spending more and more money on the games itself, and then finally you get this exposure through a portfolio of exceptional companies with exceptional potential in the long term"

Prior to joining LeifBridge and Shard Capital as Head of Research, Ernst spent 12 years with what is now Quilter plc, in both the multi-asset team at Quilter Investors as well as the discretionary wealth management business, Quilter Cheviot. Before joining what was then still Old Mutual in 2008, Ernst spent 2 years at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in London. Ernst has a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a B.Sc. (HONS) in Financial Engineering from the University of Pretoria in South Africa and is a CFA charterholder.