William Blair fund gets Lonsec rating

In its review, Lonsec said the fund's strengths include, "the manager's history of managing emerging markets portfolios", "a quality portfolio management team, motivated analyst research pool, disciplined stable investment process" and the manager's "track record of maintaining a conservative approach to capacity management".

Lonsec described William Blair as "a fundamental, active investment firm applying an investment philosophy that seeks to invest in quality growth companies", and added that "this focus typically results in the fund exhibiting heightened growth-style characteristic relative to the benchmark". Lonsec also noted that "the fund is a 'long' only emerging markets/regional equities product and, as such, will generally sit within the growth component of a balanced portfolio".

Lonsec believes the fund is suitable for high-risk profile investors with a five-year-plus investment time horizon.

William Blair's head of Australian and New Zealand institutional distribution, Alex Francois, said the rating reinforced the benefits of William Blair's highly active, unconstrained quality growth approach to portfolio management of emerging markets equities.

"We value the ratings process undertaken by Lonsec and believe the fund will add significant value within a diversified portfolio," he said.

"We believe emerging markets continue to be an area that in the medium to long term will feature in most people's investment horizon, and the fund offers Australian investors access to those attractive developing markets that continue to benefit from exposure to global themes, like favourable demographic growth."