The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relevant to wealth advisors and their clients.

Vanguard
Investment manager Vanguard has launched the active Vanguard USD High Yield Corporate Bond Fund, giving investors access to a range of higher-income corporate bonds, predominantly issued by US businesses, through a low-cost, actively managed mutual fund.

The Vanguard USD High Yield Corporate Bond Fund aims to provide a higher total return (capital growth plus income) than its benchmark, the Bloomberg US High Yield per cent Issuer Cap Index, through security selection and rigorous risk management. The fund also has the flexibility to invest in select off-benchmark opportunities, the firm said in a statement.

“We know investors are looking for fixed income solutions that can help them generate income without significantly increasing complexity within their portfolios. This fund provides access to a well-established part of the bond market through a straightforward, actively managed approach, at a highly competitive cost," Claire Aley, head of product and PRD, Europe, said.

The fund will be managed by Vanguard's fixed income group. The team, which combines expertise in economics, interest rates, credit research, trading, portfolio construction and risk management, manages more than $3 trillion in fixed income assets globally.

J O Hambro Capital
J O Hambro Capital Management has launched the JOHCM Emerging Markets Fund, an Irish-domiciled UCITS managed by a three-person investment team led by Emery Brewer.

The team, which has overseen the strategy for institutional clients since 2010, manages $1.2 billion of assets in emerging market equities. Brewer has more than 30 years in the industry and has run the strategy for more than 25 years, including at his previous firm, Driehaus Capital Management, the firm said in a statement. He is joined by fund managers Ladislav Sabo and Dalibor Kovác, who bring local knowledge and contribute to the team’s bottom-up stock selection and top-down macro-overlay, backing companies that can build products or lead their domestic markets.

The fund takes a high-conviction, all-cap approach, looking beyond the largest companies and most heavily weighted markets in the index to capture the full breadth of the asset class. Its dual growth philosophy blends secular growth, companies with strong and sustainable long-term potential, with recovery growth, businesses whose earnings momentum is improving but is not yet reflected in their valuations, the firm said.

The approach is built to work across market cycles, with the team targeting companies at inflection points where improving growth, strong fundamentals and timeliness align. Three independent signals, news flow, earnings and price momentum, help the team spot these turns early, while proprietary screening for accounting and governance risk runs throughout the life of each holding.

The fund will invest at least 80 per cent of its net assets in emerging market equities and equity-related instruments and will seek to outperform the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, with net dividends reinvested, over a five-to-seven-year period. It is classified as Article 8 under the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.