Guinness launches Global Real Assets strategy

Guinness Global Investors (“Guinness”) today launches the Guinness Global Real Assets Fund.

The Fund is Irish-domiciled and managed by Mark Brennan. Previously, Mark was one of the lead fund managers on the Foresight listed infrastructure funds.

The portfolio will consist of listed infrastructure and real estate companies that own and operate assets across sectors including utilities, transportation, communications, digital infrastructure, data centres and healthcare. The strategy leverages the quality-focused approach to equity investing that Guinness pursues across its fund range and benefits from the infrastructure sector’s adjacency to Guinness’s long-standing energy expertise.

Mark Brennan said: “I am delighted to bring this strategy to the market with Guinness. The listed infrastructure and real estate opportunity set is global, diverse, and set up for a long-term renaissance driven by consistent flows of capital and secular tailwinds. The last few years of rapid rate tightening put pressure on these asset-heavy business models, but as macro conditions now normalise, we see high-quality real asset owning companies providing stable and growing income, and resilient earnings growth.

"The Fund’s quality-led approach and benchmark-agnostic portfolio construction provide a differentiated exposure to this global opportunity set. The Fund also provides a natural inflation hedge for investors, and its lower correlation to wider markets is a defensive form of diversification.”

Edward Guinness, CEO of Guinness Global Investors, said: “Our Global Real Assets Fund provides clients with access to this increasingly significant asset class using a process that has been proven to deliver high performance across long time periods. We are delighted to have a fund manager of Mark Brennan’s skill and experience at the helm of our new fund.

"We have learnt that it is critical to focus on identifying high-quality companies to include in our funds. We achieve this in particular by having an analytical emphasis on sustainable free cashflows rather than yields and by assessing each company on its individual merits rather than investing thematically in specific infrastructure sub sectors."