Wellington Management launches an equity fund with a contrarian and bottom-up approach
11 MAR, 2025
Wellington Management has announced today the launch of its active management fund Wellington Global Equity Value Fund. This UCITS fund will be managed by Stefan Brugger from the Frankfurt office.
Stefan relies on Wellington's extensive analysis capabilities (with more than 800 investment professionals with an average of 17 years of experience), particularly on Wellington's Value franchise and its Global Industry Research platform, as well as equity portfolio managers, equity team analysts and breadth of resources necessary to generate investment ideas and implement his newly launched strategy.
Stefan Brugger joined Wellington Management in October 2024, after nearly two decades at Union Investment. For 12 years he managed Union Investment's Global Value Equity strategy.
How does the fund invest?
The Global Equity Value Fund is actively managed and seeks to generate a long-term total return superior to the MSCI World Value Index, identifying companies with insufficient earnings through fundamental analysis, taking into account the behavioral biases of investors which, in the team's opinion, can often influence market sentiment and not fully reflect the long-term potential of a company. The fund will normally include between 70 and 90 values, with a preference for medium and large capitalization companies.
Brugger will employ a contrarian approach, taking positions when a company records earnings below its long-term potential and, normally, selling these positions when the team believes that earnings are above their long-term potential. When selling these positions, Stefan and his team reinvest the capital in other companies with earnings below expectations.
Markets have lately been strongly driven by certain specific themes, which has led to an extreme divergence in valuations and has created interesting opportunities for value managers. Our value approach offers a truly differentiated source of alpha and can help diversify against the extreme concentration of the market in large capitalization stocks. Despite the good results of the market's growth sectors, there is still a wide group of companies with great growth potential. This is a ripe opportunity for our stock selection
Stefan Brugger, manager of the Wellington Global Equity Value Fund
Clients are increasingly demanding differentiated products in the current economic regime. Stefan and his dynamic approach to value investing is truly diversifying and is backed by our extensive internal analysis capability. We are delighted to launch the Wellington Global Equity Value Fund to meet client demand.
Roy Smale, global wealth management director for EMEA and APAC at Wellington Management
