Special Opportunities Fund SICAV– World Select Fund

The Sub-Fund is a low net (-30% to +30%) long-short UCITS fund focusing predominantly on the American, European and Asian markets. It employs a fundamental approach to identify quality companies through an investment universe screening and company review process and promotes environmental characteristics as per Article 8 of SFDR. It is actively managed with no reference to a benchmark. 

The main objective of the Sub-Fund is to achieve long-term capital appreciation principally by predominantly (i.e, more than 51% of its assets) investing in securities listed on stock exchanges or dealt in on regulated markets of countries throughout America, Western Europe and Asia (including but not limited to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, member states of the European Union, Switzerland, Norway, South Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore), respective of their industry and sector affiliation. 

The stock selection process starts with screenings of the investment universe to identify potential candidates by considering CO2 footprint factors (as further described below under section “ESG promotion”). These potential investments are then investigated to review their fundamental characteristics, with a particular focus on their earnings quality profile. A conclusion is then reached that also include indications regarding valuation and tactical inputs (to be understood as technical indicators). 

According to the principle of risk diversification, the Sub-Fund’s net assets are mainly invested in a portfolio of equities or equity-related securities. Exposure may be reached through investment in various instruments including but not limited to equities, options, warrants, contracts for difference and other derivative instruments both exchange-traded and over-the-counter which underlying are predominantly listed equities and eligible financial indices. 

ESG Promotion

Sustainability risks are integrated into the Sub-Fund’s investment management process and the Sub-Fund promotes environmental characteristics with a specific focus on CO2 pollution. Therefore, it applies an environmental indicator upgrade approach by considering the tons of CO2 per million dollars invested indicator divided by the long exposure of the portfolio of the Sub-Fund (“CO2 Footprint”). 

The CO2 rating coverage rate is, measured on a yearly average based on the month-end net asset value of the Sub-Fund and on company specific data or data for the industry companies belong to, at least 90% of the Sub-Fund’s large capitalisation equity long position investments (or 75% for equities issued by small and medium capitalisation equity investments and emerging market countries).

The average CO2 Footprint of the Sub-Fund’s long equity portfolio should be, measured on a yearly average, based on the month-end NAVs of the Sub-Fund on company specific data or data for the industry companies belong to and on frequency of updates of relevant data of CO2 Footprint,  lower than the sum of 50% of the average CO2 Footprint of the MSCI World index and 50% of the average CO2 Footprint of the MSCI Emerging Markets index. The attention of the investors is however drawn to the fact that the Sub-Fund is actively managed and does not replicate the MSCI World or MSCI Emerging Markets indices. The portfolio manager has full discretion to select the investments and may freely choose how to compile the portfolio and is not tied to these indices in selecting and weighting equities. These indices are used for ESG promotion purposes only and are not consistent with the environmental characteristics promoted by the Sub-Fund.

Principal Adverse Impacts Statement: Sustainability Factor

Regarding environmental governance, the KPI, subject to the CO2 rating coverage defined above, is, our view, the main driver to fight climate change and can be monitored in a relatively consistent way due to the fact that data providers have established methodologies to calculate the CO2 Footprint of companies. While the investments of the strategy are also based on other factors, are limited in size, and only focused on the public equity markets, we believe that, since many companies either are already or look one day to be listed on public equity markets, our approach will (as part of a drive by, we hope, a significant number of investment strategies doing things similarly to ours) hopefully incentivize companies to reduce their CO2 Footprint and therefore help fight climate change. This is why the KPI was chosen as the “Sustainability Factor”. The use of the Sustainability Factor is therefore the way sustainability risks are integrated into investment decisions.

ESG Investment Policy

We believe that incorporating, for this Sub-Fund, ESG KPIs into our stock screening, selection and portfolio construction processes is an important way to initiate a transition to a more environmentally sustainable future. To do so and given the expected number of holdings, we have decided to focus for now on where high-quality data is available which is, in our view, climate change mitigation and namely CO2 Footprint which is used as a KPI to derive the Sustainability Factor. 

The investment process entails, among others:

• a review of the data points of the Sustainability Factor available for the companies that are potential investments,
• an evaluation of the impact of an investment into a specific company on the overall level of the KPI at Sub-Fund level and
• a decision to proceed or not, to buy or to sell a given investment based on a number of factors including but not limited to that impact.

Sustainability Factor Monitoring

Data from free or paid publicly available sources is used to monitor regularly the profile of investments based on the Sustainability Factor.

Click here for risk factors of the Fund.