The fund aims to deliver long-term growth by investing in companies across the globe. It uses a value investing approach, which means investing in companies where the manager believes the share price doesn’t reflect a company’s long-term potential, perhaps because of some short-term uncertainty.
The fund’s managed by Sebastien Mallet. Mallet is a Vice President at T. Rowe Price Group and has over 20 years of experience investing in global companies using a value investment style. He began managing the Global Value Equity fund in 2012. There are few global fund managers with such a long and consistent track record in value investing. Marta Yago is Associate Portfolio Manager on the fund, though our conviction in the fund is mainly due to Mallet’s involvement given his length of experience in global value investing. They also have the support of T. Rowe Price’s extensive global research team.
Mallet has built a strong long-term track record. The fund has performed better than the average fund in the IA Global sector since launch in November 2012. Like many global value funds that don’t tend to invest as much in US or technology companies as growth-focused funds, this one hasn’t performed as well as its benchmark, the MSCI World Index, over this time. That said, our analysis shows this fund has performed better than many other global value funds as well as the MSCI World Value Index.
The fund also offers important diversification. While US and technology companies have done well in recent years, different sectors, themes and countries will come in and out of favour and perform well at different times. For example, the fund performed much better than the market in 2022 when value companies outperformed. Over the longer term, we expect the fund to do better when value investing is in favour, and the reverse is also true. Given Mallet invests in some higher-quality companies we also expect the fund to hold up better than some others when markets fall but may not rise as quickly when they go up. For example, the fund held up well during the market volatility in March and April this year.
Overall, we think Mallet has the experience, skill, and support to deliver good long-term returns to patient investors.
Comment provided by Aiden Moyle, Investment Analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown:
