Lehman Brothers Asset Management has been awarded a mandate of 80-100 million by De Eendragt Pensioen N.V. into the Anti-Benchmark family of funds, managed by Lehman Brothers Asset Management.
De Eendragt Pensioen N.V., is a fast growing Dutch life insurance company with over 1 billion under management, that provides collective pension schemes to 21 companies.
The mandate consists of equity portfolio management and a currency hedging overlay and will be split between Lehman Brothers’ Anti-Benchmark USA, Euro, and Japan funds.
Anti-Benchmark is a quantitative investment style designed to maximize the efficiency of equity portfolios, by focusing on the benefits of diversification. Anti-Benchmark provides investors with access to a more diversified exposure to equities than market cap weighted benchmarks, offering potential for higher returns with less risk.
“After careful consideration, we have made a choice between alpha generating products and alternative beta strategies, for example differently composed indices. The Anti-Benchmark product seems to offer the holy grail of higher returns in combination with lower risk. Moreover, back tests of quantitative beta strategies are much more reliable in forecasting future returns than tests of judgmental management styles. Therefore, we expect LBAM to be able to continue its outstanding historical performance in the future. Particularly in a more demanding environment this investment strategy should be able to yield a decent return that is the result of already in place skills, instead of incidental and unpredictable luck,” says Philip Menco, CEO, De Eendragt Pensioen N.V.
“We are delighted at this mandate from one of the Netherland’s most innovative pension providers and as such are proud to be associated with De Eendragt Pensioen. We believe that this family of products helps clients maximise returns relative to risk, and have seen significant interest in them,” adds Yves Choueifaty, head of Quantitative Asset Management, Europe, Lehman Brothers Asset Management.
Lehman Brothers’ Investment Management Division encompasses three global businesses: Private Equity, which provides investment opportunities in privately negotiated transactions across a variety of asset classes for institutional and qualified individual investors; Private Investment Management, which offers comprehensive investment, wealth advisory and capital markets execution services for high net worth individuals and businesses, leveraging all of the resources of the Firm; and the Asset Management business, which offers proprietary asset management products across traditional and alternative asset classes, through variety of distribution channels to individuals and institutions.