Fidelity America E-Acc-EUR

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|26/06/2024

by Michael Born
Fidelity America represents an interesting proposition in value-oriented US equities. Although the new managers have shown a few years of working well together and are experienced investors, they have a limited amount of time running money in this style. As a result, the People and Process Pillars are maintained at Average.

Following the departure of prior lead Angel Agudo in May 2021, the strategy has been managed by his prior deputy Ashish Bhardwaj, with Rosanna Burcheri joining later that year. Burcheri has over 25 years of experience, joining from Artemis, where she was a comanager on the quality-oriented Global Select strategy since 2011. Although there is some crossover in the universe, the Artemis strategy had more of a growth focus and a universe that concentrated on global stocks. As a result, it is not a like-for-like switch, and while Bhardwaj had managed Fidelity’s Global Industrials strategy since 2015, he has only been the assistant portfolio manager here since 2019.

Moving away from being a contrarian value strategy, the new managers run more of a core-value portfolio. In practical terms, this meant applying their valuation-oriented approach across the stylistic spectrum, so we saw growth stocks and high-quality healthcare names added as well as a reduction in the financials exposure. They are looking for companies that are mispriced, either because they are out of favor or their intrinsic asset value is misunderstood, and will generally invest in a somewhat contrarian manner, topping up on weakness and selling into strength. Indeed, we saw good evidence of the portfolio managers topping up their exposure to growth names like Salesforce and Alphabet when they were at low valuations after selling off over 2022. Overall, Burcheri and Bhardwaj are now trying to own quality companies that can benefit from long-term growth tailwinds, as well as avoiding dying industries and potential value traps, as opposed to buying cheap names alone. In addition, there will be a strong emphasis on environmental, social, and governance concerns as a minimum of 50% of a fund’s assets will be invested in stocks with sustainable characteristics. There continues to be a focus on names benefiting from trends in nearshoring, digital infrastructure, and changing healthcare costs.

Performance has been decent since the new portfolio managers arrived. From the start of October 2021, through to the end of May 2024, the clean W acc share class of the UK vehicle delivered annualized performance of 9.5%, 0.7% ahead of peers but lagging the Morningstar US Value Index and the S&P 500. The latter yardstick is maybe to be expected since the performance of the US market as a whole over 2023 was particularly driven by mega-cap growth stocks, which they will stylistically underweight. Over the year, they had strong contributions from some of their technology names, like the aforementioned Salesforce and Google, as well as Fedex, XPO, and Wells Fargo.

 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™The new managers are starting to settle.
To find out how Morningstar rates a fund click here.
Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAverage
ParentAbove Average
ProcessAverage
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
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