Manulife Asset Management launches two new funds

The Manulife Global Contrarian Fund and Manulife Strategic Income Fund are the first global funds to be launched by Manulife Asset Management in Singapore.

According to Manulife Asset Management Singapore, the two funds are Singapore dollar-denominated funds which feed into strategies managed by Manulife Asset Management’s global equity and fixed income teams, based in Boston, USA. Both funds are available in Singapore to retail investors via the Aviva Navigator platform and to institutional investors.

Darryl Aw, Regional Head of Channel Distribution, Manulife Asset Management Singapore said: “We have harnessed the expertise of our international network of fixed income and equity managers to offer these two superior-performing global funds to Singaporean investors. Today’s announcement is indicative of the demand we are seeing from institutional and retail investors for global funds that carefully manage risk and generate consistently strong returns.”

Manulife Global Contrarian Fund

The Manulife Global Contrarian Fund aims to generate superior returns by investing in ‘overlooked or misunderstood’ companies selling at a discount to their intrinsic value. The fund also targets companies whose business models have the potential to generate high returns, that have attractive valuations or strong cash flows and which have proven management teams with strong track records for creating value.

The fund is part of Manulife’s Global Opportunities strategy, managed by Chris Arbuthnot in Boston. The strategy was top ranked for its 3 and 5 year performance by Bloomberg Markets magazine in 2010 and, in January 2011, topped the Global Equity performance charts to pick up a Best of the Best performance award from Asia Asset Management for its 3 and 5 year performance.

Manulife Strategic Income Fund

The Manulife Strategic Income Fund is a multi-sector fixed income fund which allocates between global currencies, government and corporate bonds to generate strong consistent returns, while reducing risk. The dynamic and flexible approach of the underlying strategy has led it to consistently outperform its benchmark by 2% gross over 10, 5 and 3 year periods. Indeed over a 1 year period, it generated returns of 16.64% compared to benchmark returns of 8.16%.

The strategy is managed by Daniel Janis in Boston and offers investors the benefits of diversification across multiple bond sectors but with the ability to emphasize any particular sector that the portfolio management team believes has the potential to generate superior returns at any one time. It also has the flexibility to make opportunistic currency investments.