The fund seeks to maximize total return by investing in companies in the United States.
The sub-adviser’s investment strategy focuses on companies that are lagging in market price and trading at a discount to their estimated intrinsic value from a list of companies included in the benchmark index.
Next, the research team is driven by fundamental analysis to focus on identifying discrepancies between a security’s fundamental value and its market price.
Then the team bases its estimates of value upon economic, industry, and company analysis, as well as upon a company’s management team, competitive advantage and core competencies.
The team then constructs a portfolio of stocks across industries with attractive relative price/value characteristics.
The sub-adviser employs both a positive and negative screening process in selecting securities for the fund.
The positive screening process will identify securities of companies that are fundamentally attractive and that have superior valuation characteristics.
In addition, the positive screening process will also include evaluating material, fundamental sustainability factors such as environmental, social, and governance performance of companies.
The negative screening process will exclude from the fund’s portfolio securities with more than 5% of sales in industries such as alcohol, tobacco, defense, nuclear, Genetically Modified Organisms, water bottles, gambling and pornography, and will entirely exclude all firearms issuers and companies within the energy sector as defined by MSCI and its Global Industry Classification Standard.
