Bestinvest says
Oliver Russ is a long established European equity income manager and this fund was one of the first to provide investors with income from European equities.
Argonaut is a boutique investment house that revolves largely around two fund managers, Barry Norris and Oliver Russ, that specialise in European equities. Russ and Norris work closely and tend to have a similar overarching macro-economic view. Both managers manage their respective funds starting from this framework.
We therefore feel that investors can benefit from this view better by investing in Norris' more unconstrained Alpha fund. We also feel that the recent focus primarily on income and the macro economic environment has been to the detriment of total returns in this fund.
Russ invests in companies that pay an above average dividend to investors, or are likely to do so within the next two years, to produce a yield to investors above that of the index (MSCI Europe ex UK). Typically the fund will consist of 30-50 stocks that have good yield characteristics, these will predominantly be large cap stocks.
The starting point for the fund is what Russ considers to be the macro-economic backdrop. It is into this framework that Russ places many, although certainly not all, of the companies that he purchases.
When looking at companies Argonaut use a quantitative screening system called JASON that ranks the universe of investigable stocks from 1 to 500 for each of four metric screening factors: value, momentum, growth and quality. This process is used for idea generation and seeks to identify mis-priced opportunities.
The fund may invest in companies that are headquartered outside Europe but generate income within the continent.