Enhancing Portfolios with Global Equity Managers

Abstract

As progressive investors gravitate away from style-box investing and embrace both unconstrained managers and core–satellite portfolios, the employment of global equity is a natural evolution. Global managers run portfolios unconstrained by country, seeking opportunities across the globe. Implementing talented global managers in a portfolio has several advantages: 1) global flexibility allows the pursuit of unconstrained alpha; 2) country of domicile has become a less important driver of stock performance; 3) the non-U.S. stock universe increasingly dwarfs that of the U.S.; and 4) global managers have outperformed a blend of U.S. and international managers. Sourcing best-of-breed global equity managers is not easy, and many strategies are not integrated into their investment process, but simply a U.S. strategy combined with an international strategy. The ability to go anywhere can also result in high tracking error or high volatility. Higher correlations and an increased prevalence of unconstrained investment strategies means that the investment industry is on the cusp of a major shift in how portfolios are managed. The last major shift began in 1992, when the earlier segmentations among “growth,” “growth and income,” and “aggressive growth” were slowly replaced by the Morningstar style-box matrix model (large/mid/small and value/blend/growth). This transition only took a few years, as the consultant/advisor community accepted these neat categories fairly easily. The next secular change will likely take three to five years to be fully complete, but it will likely involve variations on global equity categories.