Dr Niall O’Connor on his investment approach in challenging times
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Investors are weighing up strategies for what may be a drawn-out economic recovery from the pandemic. Many want to benefit from that recovery over the longer term while also considering the risk of bumps along the way.
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In this Focus, Dr Niall O’Connor, manager of Brooks Macdonald’s Defensive Capital Fund, cautions that the pursuit of significant levels of ‘safe’ yield may no longer be realistic in many markets. As a manager with a perspective on a range of assets – including music rights, convertibles and real estate – he offers his market outlook. He also tells us about the goals of his fund, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary this Spring.
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All data provided by Brooks Macdonald, unless otherwise stated, as at 31.08.20. The information presented in this document, including charges and performance, is for Sterling Class A Shares. Other share classes may be available. This document is for professional investors only and is not to be used by or distributed to retail investors. Structured products are complex investments which may not be suitable for all investors. The price of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up and neither is guaranteed. Investors may not get back the capital they invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Changes in rates of exchange may have an adverse effect on the value of an investment. Changes in interest rates may impact the value of fixed interest investments within the fund. The value of your investment may be impacted if the issuers of underlying fixed interest holdings default, or market perception of their credit risk changes. There are additional risks associated with investments in emerging or developing markets. This document and the information contained herein is confidential and has been prepared and is intended for use on a confidential basis solely by licensed financial advisers. It may not be reproduced, redistributed or passed on to any other persons or published in whole or in part for any purpose. The funds to which this document refers are not registered for distribution to retail investors outside the United Kingdom. This document does not constitute an offer or invitation to the public to subscribe for or purchase any interest and accordingly no facilities for participation by the public are being made available pursuant to this document. Nothing in this document implies any representation, recommendation or advice (including investment advice) of any kind by Brooks Macdonald Asset Management Limited, its management, employees or affiliates with respect to its content and you should not make any investment decisions on the basis of it. Investment Fund Services Limited (IFSL) is the Authorised Corporate Director for the IFSL Brooks Macdonald Fund. IFSL is registered in England No. 06110770 and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered office: Marlborough House, 59 Chorley New Road, Bolton, BL1 4QP. Copies of the Prospectus and Key Investor Information Documents are available from www.ifslfunds.com or can be requested as a paper copy by calling 0808 178 9321 or writing to IFSL, Marlborough House, 59 Chorley New Road, Bolton, BL1 4QP. Brooks Macdonald is a trading name of Brooks Macdonald Group plc used by various companies in the Brooks Macdonald group of companies. Brooks Macdonald Group plc is registered in England No 4402058. Registered office: 21 Lombard Street London EC3V 9AH. All services, unless otherwise stated, provided by Brooks Macdonald Asset Management Limited. Brooks Macdonald Asset Management is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered in England No 3417519. Registered office: 21 Lombard Street London EC3V 9AH. More information about the Brooks Macdonald Group can be found at www.brooksmacdonald.com Additional notice for Singapore: This document is not a prospectus, as defined in the Securities and Futures Act, and the funds to which this document refers are not registered for distribution to retail investors.
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As the global economy enters a protracted period of uncertainty, where might professional investors look for higher yields with an attractive balance of risk and reward? The answers may not be obvious.
In this Focus, we hear from Marc Stacey and James Macdonald, who manage BlueBay’s Financial Capital Bond Fund and target opportunities in the capital structure of financial institutions. They tell us why they are presently focusing on the contingent capital bonds (CoCos) of European ‘national champion’ banks – and offer views on the banking industry going forward.
Marc Stacey and James Macdonald on why the stars might be aligning for select contingent capital bonds
THE INTERVIEW
How defensive are you feeling?
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We’re a long-only basket of convertibles, autocalls, investment companies and zero dividend preference shares
He’s not too worried about the frothiness in relation to the fund, because he does not invest directly in tech giants: “we tend to be more a value-oriented fund.” But he thinks investing may face a turning point.
Stressing students
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As the manager of Brooks Macdonald’s Defensive Capital Fund, which celebrated its 10th anniversary at the height of the market crisis in March, Dr Niall O’Connor is focused on that problem. “We’re capturing as much of the upside as we can while trying to protect to some degree on the downside,” he says.
O’Connor’s strategy relies on a diverse mix of global asset classes. “We’re a long-only basket of convertibles, autocalls, investment companies and zero dividend preference shares,” he says, with exposure to underlyings such as the US pharmaceuticals industry, music rights and specialist lending.
Defensive diversity
he Covid-inspired market plunge and bounce back underlines an age-old investing paradox. How can you dampen exposure to market falls while retaining exposure to recovery and long-term growth?
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Defaults may remain surprisingly low, relative to the 2008 global financial crisis, due to government and central bank support, he says, but the equity market recovery looks fragile.
“Investors haven’t yet got the message that you can’t really get ‘safe’ yield anymore,” he says. “Everyone thinks UK equity dividends will be low this year and next year back to 4-5%. But dividend futures are suggesting sub 3% in 2025.”
Turbulent Times
The team started serious stock picking again in May, “earlier than other people due to some interesting market anomalies,” as investors deserted whole sectors without reference to the strong positioning of specific stocks. He says the post-Covid market is driven by overarching stories – ‘Amazon good, lending bad’ – whereas “we like to dig beneath the surface and invest in places others have given up.”
There are still a lot of convertibles where you can get both equity optionality and decent yield
George Crowdy tells how the corona storm is reshaping sustainability and why his new fund embraces emerging markets
Since then the fund has enjoyed the market bounce with April the fund’s best month ever, O’Connor says, “and as of early September we’re ahead of our longer-term targets.” Meanwhile, the fund’s long-only stance should help keep its performance relatively transparent in a range of recovery scenarios, compared to some other absolute return funds.
Bounce back
That diversification faced a sharp test in March, despite defensive positioning. “We missed some of the rally in December 2019 because we felt equity markets had run ahead of themselves, and were holding 13% cash – our highest cash level ever – with autocall holdings, which tend to have the most downside risk in our portfolio, running down to probably the lowest level on record,” he says.
He thinks that the damage to business models and the continuing threat of the virus means economic recovery might look like the Nike ‘swoosh’ symbol – rapid descent with a very gradual recovery like that now emerging in China, as fear slowly ebbs away.
Slow swoosh
“Retail investors have extra money in their pockets because there’s been nowhere to spend it and no sports to bet on,” he says, “so investing in stock markets has become a bit of a game – for instance, buying leveraged call options in stocks at all-time highs.”
Banks are part of the solution because they are part of the monetary policy transmission mechanism
CoCo triggers are normally set well below where we would expect to see the point of non-viability for a banking institution today
The team also argues that CoCos may prove a flawed mechanism because, if a bank weakens, two frontline forms of CoCo risk – coupon risk, and CoCo trigger risk – could tend to collapse into the final risk type: regulatory intervention through the resolution regime.
If a bank did not pay CoCo coupons, says Macdonald, they might lose access to wholesale markets. And markets accustomed to substantial equity buffers may not support banks that allow capital ratios to fall too low. “CoCo triggers are normally set well below where we would expect to see the point of non-viability for a banking institution today,” says Macdonald.
Going or gone?
Alternative high yield strategies don’t look especially appealing in today’s markets. The BlueBay team point, for example, to the low rewards available for assuming duration risk in long-dated government bonds. And they think that emerging market and high yield corporate bonds are less likely to benefit from structural support than 'national champion' banks.
This suggests that “while CoCos in Additional Tier 1 (AT1) of the bank capital structure were designed to absorb losses while the bank remained a going concern, some are actually more likely to only suffer a real loss when the bank is essentially a gone concern.” This scenario might mean that, “some AT1 CoCos are potentially very mispriced versus other parts of the bank capital structure” he says.
Star sign
“To a degree the stars may have aligned: banks look stronger coming into the crisis than at any point over the last 10 years; you have an instrument that we don't think works reliably as a ‘going concern’ instrument; and today’s macroeconomic crisis hasn't come from the banking sector,” says Macdonald.
Marc Stacey and James Macdonald, who manage BlueBay’s Financial Capital Bond Fund, have argued for years that this kind of subordinated debt may represent a sweet spot in bank capital structure, so long as the issuer is robust. Will the corona crisis be the test of fire that proves their reasoning?
CoCos help bank regulators relieve and recapitalise troubled banks through a variety of mechanisms, such as the suspension of CoCo coupons, and converting CoCo debt into equity or writing it off if certain triggers are reached, e.g., the bank’s core Tier 1 capital falls below a given ratio. In return for accepting this risk, investors are paid relatively generous coupons.
The BlueBay team say that between 2008 and 2020 a gap opened up between the high yields available from CoCos and an apparent reduction in bank risk caused by:
Better banks
The team thinks CoCo yields remained high partly because CoCos are a relatively novel and complex instrument – absent from most fixed income indices and unattractive to constrained investors.
Discount driver
But will the team’s reasoning survive Covid-19 and a protracted climb in bank losses, for example from the default of overleveraged corporations? The team say the role of banks in this crisis is very different to their role in 2008.
Chasing champions
instruments designed after the 2008 financial crisis to act as shock absorbers if a bank runs into trouble.
t’s an interesting time to be a fund manager investing in contingent capital bonds or CoCos – hybrid debt
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“With the rise of passive investing and ETFs, fixed income instruments that don’t fit into a box seem to trade with a discount,” says Stacey.
“The virus created this macroeconomic situation and today banks are part of the solution because they are part of the monetary policy transmission mechanism,” says Macdonald. To avoid a credit crunch, “when coronavirus struck it was almost essential for many policy makers to come up with government loan guarantee schemes in addition to offering banks cheap access to liquidity,” says Stacey.
Those schemes have dampened the initial impact on banks but what about the later stages of a slow recovery? “As government support roll offs, that is indeed when you're likely to see actual bank losses rather than projected losses,” says Macdonald. “But at that point, you'll hopefully be seeing some form of economic growth.”
The next few years may still prove a precarious time, especially for systemically unimportant or weaker banks and those exposed to idiosyncratic risks. That’s why the team focuses on issuer selection – particularly identifying European banks that act as ‘national champions’ – and tracking the thinking of regulators and policy makers, as well as the specifics of each instrument.
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Marc Stacey and James Macdonald, Fund Managers
BlueBay Financial Capital Bond Fund
The March volatility has prompted some soul searching. “I think we got the macro and epidemiology roughly right, but we didn’t quite get right the degree of fear – the behavioural side,” he says. “We might need to read the Daily Mail a bit more, and the FT a bit less!”
That kind of macro call is important because at critical points, “stock picks are pointless unless you’ve got the macro direction roughly right,” says O’Connor. But most of the time, his fund is “very much a bottom-up construction with a top-down overview.”
Macro moments
“But as a long-only fund, it’s really impossible to be positioned defensively enough when everything sells off,” he says. “At one point, we were down 20% year-to-date and UK equities were down 34% so we captured more downside than we’d have liked. It wasn’t comfortable, but we were confident the recovery would be as brutal on the upside so we held our nerve around the market capitulation point of March 12th.”
But he’s not planning major changes to a strategy that has one of the longer performance track records in its sector. “While we have made the fund a bit more conservative, I think it’s important we don’t change our mandate for what is likely to prove a very rare event,” he says.
He points to similarities between now and 1999, before the dot com bubble burst, “including tech companies spending money to gain market share and high stock price dispersion.”
While equity upside remains important to consider, he thinks “there are still a lot of convertibles where you can get both equity optionality and decent yield.”
If safe yield is out, he thinks stress-tested yield can be found in some lending funds and real estate investment trusts (REITs).
“Things like student accommodation REITs, where stocks sold off very heavily. Even on a stressed basis you may be able to expect yields of up to 5%, for example, after haircutting the rents they’re receiving at the moment,” he says.
He avoids retail REITs – everyone is shopping online – but wonders if office REITs also sold off too sharply. After the threat of Covid-19 eventually recedes, “there will be more home working than before but the office, as a melting pot of ideas and collaboration, is far from dead.”
Brooks Macdonald
Defensive Capital Fund
Key facts
Source: BlueBay Asset Management For information purposes only
Overall sector breakdown
*Source: Brooks Macdonald, as at 31.08.2020
DCF 10-Year performance
Fund timeline, ratings and awards
FUND TYPE
Active total return
None
BENCHMARK
14 January 2015
FUND LAUNCH
UCITS
FUND STRUCTURE
USD
BASE CURRENCY
Key Facts
Notes: (1) Maximum Distributable Amount; (2) Risk Weighted Assets. Source: BlueBay Asset Management, as at 31 October 2019
The FCAP team integrate macro, regulatory, policy and bottom-up financial analysis
Source: BlueBay Asset Management, as at 31 May 2019
Regulators have been driving improvements in six key areas
Banking Fundamentals – What has changed since 2008?
BlueBay Asset Management
Source: Bloomberg, total return, net of all ongoing charges in sterling as at 31.08.20
Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
In March 2020, the Defensive Capital Fund celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Over the years, the Fund has gathered many awards and ratings and has evolved from a sub-£100m fund into a serious-sized fund investing in a broader range of assets. Its four-strong team can turn to the wealth of experience within Brooks Macdonald, which has around 500 employees and 13 offices in the UK and Channel Islands.
FUND SECTOR
Targeted Absolute Return
years
Track record
Long-only, diversified asset, low to medium risk
Dr Niall O’Connor
FUND MANAGER
Typically 100-120
NUMBER OF HOLDINGS
10
No official benchmark
REFERENCE benchmark
Autocalls 17.8%
10 highest portfolio holdings*
Convertibles 21.1%
Discounted assets 5.3%
Fixed Return 7.1%
Hedges 0.9%
Other 1.7%
Other Structured Notes 4.6%
Real Assets 21.3%
Specialist Lending 10.8%
Structured Credit 3.6%
Sept 2011 Eurozone banking crisis
Aug 2015 Global growth slowdown/oil price collapse
Oct 2018 Tech stock crash
June 2016 Brexit referendum
Mar 2020 Coronavirus impact
DCF (%)
11.0
5.2
8.4
8.2
3.8
2.5
9.3
4.8
-1.5
7.8
-3.2
Source: Brooks Macdonald
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Liquidity 5.7%
Performance
Dr Niall O'Connor, fund manager
Typically 100-200
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Calendar year performance
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
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Jan 2013
Jan 2016
DCF awarded Gold Fund Grading by S&P Capital IQ
DCF passes £200 million in FUM
Mar 2010
Nov 2012
DCF launched
DCF passes £100 million in FUM
Feb 2017
Jun 2017
DCF awarded Elite rating by Fund Calibre
DCF a finalist in Absolute Return category of the Fund Manager of the Year Awards
Jul 2017
Aug 2017
DCF selected in Absolute Return category of The Investment Adviser 100 Club
DCF selected as a Rated Fund by Rayner Spencer Mills Research (RSMR)
Dec 2017
Jan 2018
DCF awarded Highly Rated Fund status by Sharing Alpha
DCF passes £500 million in FUM
Jan 2019
Mar 2019
DCF wins Portfolio Advisor award in Absolute Return category
DCF wins Lipper Fund Award in the Absolute Return (3 years) category
Feb 2020
Mar 2020
Defaqto rating upgraded to 5 Diamond in their Absolute Return Fund Classification
DCF wins Lipper Fund Award for Absolute Return (5 years) category
Dec 2019
Jan 2020
Launched the Income share class
DCF awarded RSMR Rating
July 2017
What is the key goal of the fund?
We’re a long-only fund trying to get strong, reasonably predictable risk-adjusted returns over a three-year time horizon. A lot of our peers in the absolute return space – e.g., ‘long-short’ or ‘relative value’ funds – have good then bad years, with the only excuse being that they made wrong bets. For investors, they become an unpredictable black box.
What mix of assets do you own?
Yes, a lot. In March, the greater downside relative to equity markets than we’d hoped meant we spent a lot of time communicating during March and April using webinars, investor letters, and one-on-ones on video calls. Communication was very important.
Have you been communicating with investors in the crisis?
But I think my favourite investors’ letter I’ve ever written was our March 19th letter, when we said that what was happening was a massive ‘dash to cash’: assets weren’t being valued on their fundamentals. We had holdings in music rights that arguably shouldn’t have been impacted but went down over 20%. We said hold your nerve, this is a temporary thing and once people start investing again we’ll see a big rally – and that’s what we saw.
Setting aside our long-term performance, I’d point out that the fund started as a very small, internal-only fund. We were a sub £100 million fund back then, investing in a narrow range of asset classes. All the money was internal. Now nearly 80% of the assets of the fund are owned by external investors; we’re in a broad range of asset classes; we’ve institutionalised our processes; and have a great team of four people. So the fund has grown from being a baby into a really serious-sized fund with a very good operational backdrop.
What do you see as the fund’s big achievement over the last 10 years?
I do most of the modelling and am responsible for investment decision making. In December we hired George Marlar, our junior analyst, straight out of university, who builds models and helps with investment decisions on the REIT side of things, particularly student property.
How does the team dynamic work?
Dr Niall O’Connor, fund manager
Emma Richmond manages the operational, legal and regulatory aspects of the fund – she’s the swan paddling furiously underneath the water who keeps the fund gliding smoothly along! We’ve recently hired Georgi Dodov, an experienced convertibles analyst, to help us further explore the interesting hybrid equity/bond behaviours of convertibles in the recovery period.
The obvious ones are ‘Don’t panic’ and ‘Be a contrarian’ – in particular, be a buyer when everybody else has finally decided to sell. But I’m also slowly learning the converse: that you can be right factually but wrong on the markets. If everybody else thinks you’re wrong, you can still end up being wrong.
You were a banks analyst in the last crisis: what lessons have you learned overall?
We advise our investors to look at our returns over a three-year rolling period because that’s our official mandate. Our typical investment holding period is around two years. But if ideas come good faster, we exit and put the money somewhere else. In April and May, during the market rise, we had some unusually short duration trades where we hit our price target in a month.
What time horizons do you work to?
Niall joined Brooks Macdonald in 2013. He has 20 years of investment experience, many of which were in senior investment management roles. This includes leading the development of a range of complex derivative pricing and risk models for Independent Risk Monitoring. Niall has a PhD in Theoretical Physics and an MA and BA in Physics, all from Cambridge University.
Marc is a Senior Portfolio Manager within the Investment Grade team focusing on non-sovereign debt and specialising in financials. Marc started at BlueBay in June 2004 as an operations analyst before joining the Investment Grade Debt Team in March 2006 as a trader. He moved to his current role in January 2011. As a lead portfolio manager, Marc has been instrumental in driving the success of the European IG credit strategies as well as the peer-leading performance of the Financial Capital Bond Fund. Prior to BlueBay, Marc spent two years at CSFB focussing on credit derivatives. He holds a Bachelor of Business Science (Hons) in Economics and Finance from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Marc Stacey, Partner, Senior Portfolio Manager
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Marc: To take advantage of opportunities in the financial sector - banks or insurers - across the capital structure and across the globe. But it's fair to say that the overwhelming sweet spot we see right now is in select European bank Additional Tier 1 (AT1) instruments. That’s because of fundamental improvements we've seen in the banking sector over the last decade, because valuations can look attractive and because we think there is potential mispricing - you've got a lack of natural investors in this particular tranche within the fixed income universe.
What is the key goal of the BlueBay Capital Bond Fund?
Marc: For the last 5½ years we’ve been using an investment process we hope helps us pick the best bottom-up issuers and protect returns in risk-off moments. We had a number of those risk-off moments in the years before the pandemic, whether the 2016 recessionary fears and Chinese hard landing, or political incidents such as the Brexit process and the French and Italian elections.
How do you go about finding opportunities?
Marc: Issuer selection. The right structure, the right currency, the right triggers and so on are also important but first and foremost this is about investing in the right institution. If you're invested in 'national champion' banks that are well capitalised, well run, and profitable, the upside is potentially attractive.
What is the most important thing for you to get right?
Marc: Bottom-up fundamental analysis. Making sure that we understand what is driving the capital buffers at any one particular bank; what's driving the profitability; and potential pitfalls. Are they over-exposed to the oil and energy sector, for example? Or are they vulnerable to the hospitality sector not picking up soon as a result of the pandemic?
And what drives your issuer selection?
Marc: How they're thinking about whether or not AT1 is a gone concern or a going concern instrument, for example, or whether they are inclined to change their decision on coupons. Or their thoughts around whether a bank is systemically important or not.
What do you need to understand about their thinking?
Marc: Policy and regulatory analysis is an important part of our decision-making process, e.g., understanding what the ECB and Fed are thinking in terms of monetary policy and interest rates, as well as quantitative easing. Having strong sovereign and macro inputs into the investment process is incredibly important. And it is very much part of our process that we meet not only issuers but also policy makers and regulators on a frequent basis.
How do you take into account the political and regulatory environment?
Marc: James and I have been at BlueBay since 2007 and 2004, respectively, when the make-up of BlueBay was very much a hedge fund, so capital preservation is as important as capital generation in how we think about risk.
It also helps that we don't want to be too large in terms of AUM, as this would mean investing in more names and potentially compromising that critical bottom-up issuer selection. You want to be large enough to have influence over managements but nimble enough to move out of issuers if things change.
How does that mindset help?
Mike Fox, Head of Sustainable Investments, explains the role of RLAM’s Independent Advisory Committee
By contrast our long-only fund has, largely speaking, been pretty predictable across our 10-year history (see Fund Snapshot). But you can also see that, as a long-only fund, we are inevitably somewhat impacted by drawdowns in equity and other asset markets – and that we’ve done better in stronger years.
Things like structured notes, mainly institutional autocalls; convertibles; and then UK listed investment trusts or investment companies in a number of different sub-segments including areas such as music rights. It’s easier to say what we don’t do. We don’t really invest in plain vanilla corporate or government bonds; and we’re not investing in tech stocks.
We prefer assets that others are not looking at, particularly in the midcap space
Emma Richmond, fund manager’s assistant
In part, diversification. Most of the time that strategy works though in March, when most assets went down, diversification benefits were reduced.
What drives that asset selection?
The other driver is that we prefer assets that others are not looking at, particularly in the mid-cap space. Mid-cap companies might not have much – or any – broker coverage. We get an edge by knowing more about these companies and securities than most other people do.
That edge is also important with regard to underlying assets. For example, a lot of people think if you buy a music right, you make money for 30 years. But songs are not an annuity stream. Many make a lot of money in their first year, a smaller amount in the second, and go down from there – the decay rate is high so you have to be careful.
My PhD in physics also taught me a lot. Physics is all about taking a complicated situation, distilling it down to key elements and coming up with a mathematical model to explore sensitivities and so on. The modelling expertise is useful for derivatives; and binary decision trees can be very useful to assess the epidemiological crisis and Brexit, for instance.
Georgi is the latest addition to the team, joining in September 2020. Georgi was previously a Convertibles Analyst at RWC Partners and Aviva Investors UK. He has a degree in International Business, Finance and Economics from Manchester University, and a Masters in Investment and Wealth Management from Imperial College Business School. Georgi is a CFA Level 3 candidate.
Georgi Dodov, convertibles analyst
Emma joined the team at the start of 2017 and manages the regulatory and operational aspects of the fund. Emma was previously a Technical Specialist at IFDS involved in CASS, COLL and COBS issues for funds. She gained the Investment Operations Certificate (Securities and Investment) in 2016 and is currently studying for the Investment Management Certificate.
Justin Craib-Cox, CFA Portfolio Manager Justin joined RWC Partners as a senior member of the Convertible Bonds team and co-manager of the RWC Defensive Convertibles Fund in March 2018. He brings extensive industry experience via Investment Management, Trading & Execution, Equity & Credit Research, and Corporate Development. Prior to joining RWC, Justin worked as Senior Fund Manager to the Global Convertible Bond Portfolio, with peak AUM of USD +2.5bn, at Aviva Investments. He was responsible for global allocation, security analysis and selection, trading and execution and generation of risk-adjusted returns. Prior to Aviva Investments, he was deputy fund manager/analyst at M&G Investments. Justin is a CFA Charterholder, graduated from the University of Virginia and earned a Masters in Finance from London Business School.
George joined the DCF team in late 2019. He previously interned at Rothschild & Co where he conducted due diligence on new investment proposals. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bristol University.
George Marlar, research analyst
Simon joined Brooks Macdonald in 2015. He is responsible for the promotion and distribution of our funds throughout the UK to the Discretionary market. Prior to joining Brooks Macdonald, Simon worked at SEI Investments Company as a Sales Director. He has over 14 years’ experience in the financial services industry, having also worked at BNP Paribas Securities Services in Frankfurt and Paris, Gartmore Fund Managers and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.
Simon Pinner, discretionary sales director, Specialist Funds
The overwhelming sweet spot we see right now is in select European bank AT1 instruments
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