First RankiaPro Funds Meeting in Brussels: Insights from Fund Managers
14 OCT, 2026
By Sofía Vargas from RankiaPro Europe
The first edition of the RankiaPro Funds Meetings Brussels took place on Wednesday, October 7th, at the prestigious Hotel Le Châtelain Brussels. The event brought together leading investment professionals to exchange views on market trends, investment strategies, and the economic outlook for the coming months.
During the session, attendees had the opportunity to engage with distinguished speakers, including:
- Matt Lodge, Investment Strategist from Global X ETFs
- Thomas Peyre, Portfolio Manager - Emerging Markets from IVO Capital Partners
- Emma Gayrard, Portfolio Manager from La Française
- Nicolas Jamet, Systematic Equity Portfolio Manager from RAM Active Investments
The event began with a Funds Selector Round Table, allowing fund selectors and buyers to exchange insights on key market challenges and opportunities. Each speaker then presented their firm's investment approach, fund strategies, and market perspectives, providing attendees with valuable takeaways on portfolio positioning and asset allocation in the current economic climate.
Matt Lodge, Investment Strategist from Global X ETFs
Markets are increasingly being shaped by a wave of capex that’s gaining in magnitude and momentum. This is driving new and rapidly-escalating demand for a small number of physical assets, all the way from semiconductors to copper. The emerging drivers are becoming the dominant drivers, which is having profound effects for the downstream beneficiaries and causing a re-pricing in markets. Global X’s Data Center REITs & Digital Infrastructure UCITS ETF aims to capture the entirety of these downstream sectors of the AI buildout, rather than just 1 sub-sector, designed to allow investors to benefit as the cycle progresses. We also assess the implications for commodities markets, where resources are becoming increasingly tight, and how investors can access this specific theme.
Thomas Peyre, Portfolio Manager - Emerging Markets from IVO Capital Partners
IVO EM Corporate Debt is the flagship fund of IVO Capital Partners, a Paris-based credit manager with over €3.4 billion under management. Launched in 2015, the fund manages €1.7 billion in hard-currency emerging market corporate bonds, one of the least efficient segments of fixed income, as at 15/09/2026
The strategy exploits the sovereign ceiling: rating and pricing mechanics impose a country risk premium on every issuer, including companies whose hard-currency revenues, tangible assets and strategic importance limit their exposure to sovereign risk. Applying a "bad country, good companies" approach, the team targets national champions in utilities, infrastructure and natural resources, with an overweight to Latin America and Emerging Europe and an underweight to Asia.
Higher carry does not mean weaker balance sheets: EM HY corporates are less leveraged than US and European peers, making carry a cushion against volatility. The fund ranks first in its Morningstar category over five & ten years.
Emma Gayrard, Portfolio Manager from La Française
Building on the credit expertise of Credit Mutuel Asset Management and close collaboration across its Financial and High Yield teams, La Française Carbon Impact Floating Rates provides exposure to credit markets while protecting against rate volatility. Primarily investing in Floating Rate Notes, the fund spans the full credit spectrum, from Investment Grade through High Yield1 and subordinated debt2, within the OECD3 universe. It is designed to maintain a low modified duration, typically between 0 and 0.5, and may invest across multiple currencies, systematically hedged back into euros. The fund adjusts its risk exposure to the market cycle. This flexibility broadens the opportunity set, enhances diversification, and supports carry generation, enabling it to adapt swiftly as market conditions evolve while maximizing diversification potential. The fund offers a relatively linear performance path with limited volatility, resulting in a Morningstar five-star rating (I share class - ISIN: FR0013439163), maintained for several years4
Main risks of the fund: risk of capital loss, discretionary management risk, interest rate risk, credit risk, default risk, risk related to investing in high-yield securities, and counterparty risk. Full risk information is available on the fund's prospectus.
Nicolas Jamet, Systematic Equity Portfolio Manager from RAM Active Investments
RAM (LUX) Systematic Funds – Emerging Markets Equities is a systematic, bottom-up equity fund investing across emerging markets. It is managed in USD and measured against the MSCI Emerging Markets index.
Returns are sought through stock selection rather than country or sector bets. Independent stock-selection models run in parallel across distinct style families — value, momentum, defensive, quality and machine-learning driven — each researched and tested on its own, then combined so that no single style dominates the portfolio. Allocation is model-driven rather than discretionary, with risk managed at portfolio level.
The intended result is genuine diversification. Passive emerging market exposure has grown increasingly concentrated in a handful of large index constituents, leaving allocators with less diversification than the asset class implies. The fund draws on a considerably broader opportunity set, and is built as a complement to index exposure rather than a substitute for it.
