William Blair opens up the world to Australia

Australian investors will have greater global investment choices following the launch today of William Blair’s first unit trusts in Australia. The Chicago-based asset manager has opened its Global Leaders Equity Fund, Emerging Market Leaders Equity Fund and its Dynamic Diversified Allocation Fund to Australian institutional and wholesale investors (via platforms).

William Blair’s Global Head of Distribution, Dan Charles, said the launch of the trusts is indicative of William Blair’s desire to provide the Australian market with an opportunity to tap into the expertise of portfolio managers around the globe in the areas of global equities, emerging markets and dynamic asset allocation strategies.

“William Blair’s quality growth, bottom-up investment style looks to long-term consistent quality growth in the asset classes of global equities and emerging markets, with a style that is competitive with all of the biggest players in the Australian market,” Mr Charles said. “We look for certain characteristics – the fundamental aspects of an organisation or a company that will give long term consistent quality growth. We only use benchmarks as a reference guide, never as a guiding principle for how we invest.”

Head of Australia and New Zealand Institutional Distribution, Alex François, said William Blair’s unit trusts offer Australian investors access to broader global equity market leaders and to industry sectors and themes that may not be accessible via the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) – something that, arguably, Australians need even more than United States and European investors, because of the comparatively small size of the Australian market.

“Investors in the developed world, which is now in recovery, need greater exposure to global geopolitical themes,” Mr François said. “We look at the macroeconomic viewpoints of these themes and implement them within a portfolio that provides a total return. Emerging markets also continue to be an area that in the medium to long term will have to feature in most people’s investment horizon and will be able to via our trusts.”