IM|Power recently teamed up with SharingAlpha to present the 2020 Wisdom of the Selector awards, which gave an opportunity to celebrate leading ESG funds, driving new standards and delivering alpha across a variety of categories. We interviewed each of the winners to find out what makes their funds stand out and how they’ve protected investments against recent market volatility. You can see the full list of winners and runners up here.
Following Polar Capital Emerging Market Stars's win in the EM ESG Equities category, we spoke to the people behind the scenes, Jorry Noddekaer, Fund Manager, Polar Capital Funds Plc, to find out more about the services and products they offer.
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We believe we have a very differentiated investment process with our ‘Stars’ process created around a strong belief in an Economic Value Added (EVA) framework. Uniquely, into this framework we fully integrate sustainability by identifying longer-term, sustainable growth opportunities as well as quantifying potentially mis-priced material ESG factors. With this combination, we aim to create attractive, risk-adjusted returns as well as what we define as responsible returns.
Our sustainability analysis, while encompassing material ESG factors, is in our view broader than many and has a strong focus on what we call ‘impact to progress’. We believe we are in a growth and resource-constrained world so, by design, we want a strong bias to the key companies that can drive innovation and productivity, keep growing and optimise the resources available, both human capital and physical.
We have a strong bias towards improvements, as we want to see progress in the world. We also believe that alpha is often hidden during this development trend which is why we also search for EVA delta, an improvement in EVA that is not priced in by the market, where most often improvements come via the sustainability of the business model linked it to its full stakeholder environment. We believe that, over time, this will lead to sustainable shareholder value creation.
We now have a nine-year+ performance record as a first mover into full sustainability integration, with one of the highest levels of alpha generation in the asset class and a high quality stock-picking portfolio with positive environmental, social and governance characteristics. We believe this is evidence of the success of our unique responsible return investment Stars process, centred on our sustainable EVA creation, that separates us from our peers.
With such extreme volatility, 2020 has shown that our identification of what we believe are companies delivering sustainable shareholder value creation, with a differentiation in terms of sustainability and the way they manage their stakeholder environment while still moving forwards despite these extremely difficult conditions, makes a significant difference. This has clearly shown in our Fund’s performance.
For us, as fundamental and long-term allocators of capital on behalf of our clients, we define risk as a permanent impairment of market opportunities and lost economic profit creation. 2020 is proof of the true quality we have in our portfolio, while our integrated sustainability mindset and focus on EVA creation explains why we have been able to deliver strong returns where most other have not – and when it really mattered.
We believe we can keep delivering responsible returns, have a positive outlook for emerging markets in 2021 and see the opportunities developing there matching the investment capabilities of our process for alpha generation – the stars are truly aligning.
**The communication is for professional clients only. Capital is at risk.
