RankiaPro Funds Meeting in Paris: Insights from Fund Managers
20 MAR, 2025
By Jose Luis Palmer from RankiaPro Europe
The latest edition of the RankiaPro Funds Meetings took place on Wednesday, March 12th, at the prestigious Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris. The event brought together top investment professionals to discuss market trends, investment strategies, and economic outlooks for the coming months.
During the session, attendees had the opportunity to engage with distinguished speakers, including:
- Ulla Huotari, Portfolio Manager Emerging & Frontier Markets at Aktia Asset Management
- Alexandre Deneuville, Fund Manager at Carmignac
- Valentin Vergnaud and Estelle Bardy Manager Action Opportunity from Crédit Mutuel Asset Management
- Pierre Mouton, Head of Long Only Strategies at NS PARTNERS
The morning began with a networking breakfast, 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.
RankiaPro continues to connect investment professionals across Europe through exclusive events that foster knowledge-sharing and networking. Stay tuned for our next meetings!
Ulla Huotari, Portfolio Manager Emerging & Frontier Markets, Aktia
Aktia Asset Management’s Emerging Markets Debt (EMD) Frontier strategy seeks to provide investors with strong risk-adjusted returns by investing in local currency bonds and money market instruments in frontier markets. Focused on achieving higher returns with lower volatility than the benchmark, the strategy offers unique diversification through exposure to government bonds, money market instruments, and AAA-rated development finance institution bonds in local currencies.
Aktia’s proprietary ESG-integrated approach, including the Traffic Light Approach, is used to select countries with positive development and strong long-term growth potential. The strategy has low correlation to larger, established markets, and the returns are driven by country fundamentals rather than global risk appetite, making this strategy an ideal choice for investors seeking long-term growth and diversification to their portfolio.
Alexandre Deneuville, Fund Manager, Carmignac
Carmignac's credit expertise investment philosophy is characterised by active, flexible and opportunistic non-benchmarked management applied to a portfolio of credit issuers selected mainly through bottom-up analysis.
This approach, free from traditional management constraints, allows us to select the best opportunities without sectoral or geographical restrictions. Our selection, based on in-depth fundamental analysis, allows us to build strong convictions and focus on segments where our team sees value.
This approach has proved its worth over the past few years: the Carmignac P. Credit fund has outperformed its reference indicator (75% IG Credit and 25% HY Credit) year after year over the past seven years and has never recorded negative relative calendar performance, despite very different market environments.
Valentin Vergnaud and Estelle Bardy, Managers Action Opportunity, Crédit Mutuel Asset Management
With its distinctive dual-market strategy, the CM-AM Convictions Fund Range includes two actively managed, high-conviction funds—CM-AM Convictions Euro and CM-AM Convictions USA—which provide access to the European and U.S. markets, respectively. The range focuses on high-visibility Quality and Growth stocks that benefit from strong pricing power, leveraging the strengths of both the German and U.S. economies.
Until now, the CM-AM Convictions Funds range approach has proven effective in both regions, with recent performance figures highlighting the success of these strategies. Leveraging proprietary tools developed in-house, combining both qualitative and quantitative criteria underscoring the relevance of the fundamental approach, the range has also maintained lower volatility compared to their respective benchmarks until now. In this sense, the CM-AM Convictions Fund Range could offer a more stable path through market fluctuations while focusing on value-creation companies through quality-growth stocks.
Pierre Mouton, Head of Long Only Strategies, NS Partners
NS Partners showcased its flagship DGC Stock Selection Fund, a global blended equity strategy designed to navigate market rotations and deliver value over the long term.
The Fund aims to outperform the MSCI World Index over a full market cycle by investing in a selection of large caps stocks (> EUR 10 billion market cap.) from developed countries (no emerging markets), in all sectors with no style bias (blended approach).
DGC Stock Selection Fund employs an active and fundamental bottom-up approach of investing (stock-picking might be the main driver of outperformance over a full market cycle) and follows a disciplined investment process based on proprietary in-house research to identify the best investment opportunities in all sectors without exclusions, with the integration of ESG considerations (SFDR Article 8).
The investment process places a strong emphasis on both quality (margins, balance sheet, managements’ reliability, free cash-flow generation)and valuations (PER, comparable and historical PER, PEG, sum of the parts, DCF when applicable).
The portfolio is concentrated around 40 stocks with a high active share (>85% historically) and reflect NS Partners best long-term convictions with a low to moderate turnover ~30-35% annually.The Fund is always fully invested (no use of cash for tactical purposes and no futures, no options, no derivatives).
With its blended approach, DGC Stock Selection Fund is well-suited for any investor looking for a core equity allocation.
As of today (28 February 2025), the portfolio presents attractive financial characteristics with a 2026 estimated PE of 16.4x, annualized Free Cash Flow Yield (FCFY) for the next three years of 4.49%, and 100% of the holdings (excluding financials) generate positive free cash flow. Additionally, 92% of our investments pay dividends, and 58% engage in share buybacks.
Over the past five years, the Fund has delivered an annualized return of +15.0% in euros, outperforming the MSCI World Total Return Index and the Morningstar “Global Large-Cap Blend Equity” category average over the same period. (as of 28 February 2025, in euros, net of fees).
NS Partners is one of the largest fully independent Wealth & Asset Management Group in Switzerland with EUR 12+ billions of assets under management and administration (as of 31 December 2024).For over 60 years, the Group developed a range of investment solutions tailored to suit investors needs in all markets conditions.
