van Eyk Blueprint adds UBS-HALO

van Eyk has added the UBS-HALO Australian Share Fund to its van Eyk Blueprint Australian Shares Fund (the Fund), reflecting the intention to allocate more of the Fund to concentrated, high conviction strategies.

UBS-HALO (High Alpha Long-Term Opportunities) received an A rating from van Eyk in its March 2011 Australian Equities Concentrated Review.

van Eyk Head of Ratings Matthew Olsen said he was impressed by the depth of UBS-HALO's stock research and industry analysis and its investment discipline. The fund is guided by fundamental bottom-up research with a focus on long-term cash flows. It seeks to capitalise on the discrepancies between market prices and a stock's intrinsic value. 

"They are happy to go against the crowd because they have conviction in their research and a disciplined method of determining value," Mr Olsen said.

The UBS-HALO portfolio concentration is high. It is typically invested in around 20 stocks at any given time. van Eyk believes this concentrated, style-neutral approach blends well with other value and growth strategies in the Blueprint Australian Shares Fund.

The UBS-HALO team is led by Jakov Males, an experienced investor who is also the portfolio manager for the core UBS Australian equities strategy. "He believes that market opportunities arise when investors take a segmented view of the capital markets, particularly when investors over-react to short-term market noise and under-react to structural change," Mr Olsen said.

The addition of UBS-HALO to the Blueprint Australian Shares Fund follows the recent addition of two other concentrated, high conviction strategies, the Sigma Select Equities Fund and the Macquarie High Conviction Fund.