Philosophy
Effective January 1, 2005, AllianceBernstein assumed the sub-advisory management role for the Sceptre Foreign Equity Pooled Fund. AllianceBernstein is a global leader in institutional investment management and research, bringing together more than three decades of Alliance Capital Management's expertise in growth investing and Sandford C. Bernstein's excellence in value management.
The company employs more than 200 buy-side analysts, one of the largest research commitments in the industry, with dedicated teams for both growth and value equities. The firm manages in excess of US$ 496 Billion in assets worldwide.
The investment style for the fund is best described as Global Style Blend which is an active, core equity portfolio that holds approximately 200 - 275 stocks and is designed to take advantage of the strengths of the Alliance growth equity team and the Bernstein value equity team. It aims to deliver significant premium with consistency by combining a high conviction growth component with a deep-value component.
The growth and value components are managed separately. The Alliance growth research department focuses on identifying companies with strong business models and market positions that offer the prospect of sustainable and superior earnings growth. The growth component of the portfolio would typically have expected earnings growth above that of the broad market, but with market-like valuations.
The Bernstein value research team focuses on identifying companies that are trading at a discount to their long-term earnings power, usually because of a problem that their research shows to be temporary. The Bernstein Global Value team uses this research to construct a value portfolio that typically has valuations below that of the broad market.
The blend investment team combines the two style components with a target asset mix of 50% growth and 50% value. Whenever either component hits 55% of the total, the team rebalances to take it back to 52.5%, using a discipline that trades off the risk-reduction benefits with the cost of rebalancing. AllianceBernstein's Global Style Blend approach creates portfolios with high return potential of each style, while mitigating the style risk of investing in either individually.
