Legg Mason today announced research house Lonsec has awarded a “Highly Recommended” rating for the Legg Mason Brandywine Global Opportunistic Fixed Income Trust for a third straight year. The rating coincides with the Fund surpassing $500 million under management in Australia, which contributes to a total of $5.3 billion in Brandywine strategies.
The Legg Mason Brandywine fund report dated 2 September 2016 states “Lonsec has a high conviction in the senior investment team and considers their complementary skill-sets a competitive advantage”.
Further, “Lonsec takes comfort in the ability of the broader investment team to construct macroeconomic themes and translate them into portfolio positioning in a timely and efficient manner.”
Legg Mason Head of Sales Beau Titchkosky said “we are delighted that our flagship Brandywine offering has once again received the highest rating from one of Australia’s leading research houses. We believe Legg Mason has a compelling solution for institutions and advisers seeking to position their clients ahead of the fixed income curve, in an unconstrained and benchmark-agnostic strategy. Pleasingly, the Fund’s strong endorsement from investors and performance track record supports this value proposition.”
Brandywine is a Philadelphia-based affiliate of Legg Mason, with a long-held belief in unconstrained, benchmark-agnostic investing. The global opportunistic strategy avoids ‘hugging’ the fixed income benchmark and instead invests according to a ‘real yield’ philosophy. This differentiated style of investing has delivered Brandywine the highest return in its Mercer peer group over three and five years to July 20161. According to the Lonsec report, over five years the Fund returned 10.0% p.a. after fees, outperforming the median peer group manager return of and 7.7%. The benchmark2 returned 7.9% over a similar period.
When investment risk is taken into account, the Fund has significantly outperformed the Lonsec peer group, with a 5-year Information Ratio of 0.47 against the peer average of 0.07. This indicates that Brandywine has been more than six times more efficient than the median manager in using its ‘risk budget’ to generate excess return for investors.
The Fund is available on BT/Asgard, AMP, IOOF, Macquarie Wrap MLC Wrap, Navigator, Power Wrap and Linear platforms. The Fund is also experiencing strong interest from self-managed investors through the mFund platform.
The Legg Mason Brandywine Global Opportunistic Fixed Income Trust complements the income suite offered by Legg Mason across the fixed income, equity income, real income and multi-sector spectrum. The Legg Mason strategy is to offer Australian investors the most compelling options from its stable of nine investment affiliates: in the income space, this line-up includes Martin Currie Australia, Western Asset and Brandywine.
