Samuel Meakin: I'm here today to talk about a fund we've recently added to our analyst coverage here at Morningstar and that fund is M&G Pan European Select. It's managed by John William Olsen, who took over the fund in 2014 having joined M&G from Danske Capital. At Danske, he built strong track records on his European and also his global mandates using the same investment process that he applies here at M&G.
The process focuses on finding companies with sustainable competitive advantages that can lead to pricing power and superior returns over the long term. And then essentially, Olsen is waiting for an opportunity to buy a position in that company at an attractive price. The approach is quite research-intensive. Olsen and the team he manages spend a lot of time digging down, trying to assess the true nature of the sustainability of a company's business model and they also spend a lot of time conducting thorough scenario analysis to ascertain how a company might behave in various different economic environments.
We think the approach is sensible. We think it's robust and repeatable and we can see that the facets that Olsen is looking for in a company really coming through and being reflected in the overall characteristics of the portfolio. And given the focus on quality sustainable business models, we feel that the fund should be able to protect capital relatively well in more challenging market environments as well as being able to keep up when markets are rising and adding value through stock selection over the longer term.
So, you put all that together, and on a risk-adjusted basis, we think the fund should be able to provide strong relative returns to investors over time and therefore, we awarded the fund a Morningstar Analyst Rating of Bronze.
