Bestinvest says
The fund manager Oleg Biryulyov is Russian and has spent all of his investment career covering Russian and central/eastern European stocks. The approach is very stock specific but also very risky given the investment universe that the fund covers, so investors should expect high volatility of returns. The fund is always likely to have a large bias to Russia and note a part of the this exposure is gained through a large holding in JPMorgan Russian Securities, a London listed investment trust run by the same manager. In fact we rate this pure Russian trust three stars.
The fund aims to achieve long term capital growth through investment in companies that operate in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, a region where JPM is one of the largest investors. Russia makes up a large portion of the fund's investment universe and so commonality with Russian equity portfolios run by the same team can be high. The manager of this fund follows a similar investment approach to funds run by JF (part of JPM) in Asia, where the focus is on in-depth proprietary research of companies. The unconstrained portfolio is made up of long term strategic holdings and shorter term tactical investment opportunities. In 2009 the team was restructured so that analysts now have sector responsibilities rather than being country specialists and in 2011 the fund became a little more benchmark aware, although is still reasonably unconstrained relative to it.