Lupus alpha Sustainable Smaller Pan European Champions R

Investors should note that, relative to the expectations of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, this UCITS presents disproportionate communication on the consideration of non-financial criteria in its management.

Lupus alpha Sustainable Smaller Pan European Champions invests in top-quality stocks from the European small- and mid-cap sector and offers investors the opportunity to diversify their existing equity portfolios. The fund's bottom-up⁸ stock selection approach provides investors with opportunities to generate attractive excess returns. Enviromental, social and governance criteria are applied in the implementation of the strategy. 

Diversifying equity portfolios with European small and mid caps

Lupus alpha Sustainable Smaller Pan European Champions invests in selected European small and mid caps, thus offering investors the opportunity to diversify their existing equity portfolios - without compromising sustainability. Adding small and mid caps to an equity portfolio can thus improve its returns and reduce its risk. This is primarily due to the interdependence of country- and company-specific influences, while large-cap stocks tend to be affected by global macroeconomic factors. As a result, small- and mid-cap strategies can make use of special regional issues as well as a company's individual temporary upswing in its specialised niche. In addition, the investment universe of small- to mid-cap European companies boasts not only more than ten years of exceptional performance but also significantly lower variation than European large-cap stocks. One of the reasons for this is the wide variety of more than 1,000 stocks, which enables portfolios to be spread widely across many sectors, unlike large-cap stocks.
As a rule, analysts do not cover the European small- and mid-cap market to the same extent as is customary for large-cap companies. The resulting information inefficiency creates opportunities to use comprehensive in-house research for unearthing promising stocks and exploiting their potential for a portfolio through active management, thus offering good prospects for successful stock-picking. This strategy enables investors to achieve excess returns from European small and mid caps while at the same time diversifying their existing equity portfolios.

We defined screening criteria in order to avoid investing into companies that do not meet our minimum standards e.g. with respect to the production of controversial weapons or compliance to UN Global Compact- These criteria envolve steadily and are reviewed continuously. Moreover, ESG criteria are integrated into the stock selection process and are part and parcel of our fundamental investing analysis. 

The fund's objective is to outperform the benchmark (STOXX® Europe TMI Small Return-Index) over the long term using targeted stock-selection.  For doing so, the fund focusses on companies that meet pre-determined minimum criteria with respect to environmental, ethical, social and governance considerations. The sector and/or country allocation of the benchmark index is only of secondary importance and serves information purposes.