Franklin Biotechnology Discv A(acc)USD |



by David Kathman

Franklin Biotechnology Discovery has been on a hot streak lately, but over the longer term it hasn’t really stood out. It maintains Morningstar pillar scores of Average for both People and Process. On Oct. 1, 2024, one of this fund’s three portfolio managers, Wendy Lam, was let go after eight years on the team, part of a “reduction in force” at Franklin Equity Group. While it’s never great to see downsizing like this, other changes will help compensate for the absence of Lam. Lead portfolio manager Evan McCullough recently stepped away from his role as director of research for the group, which will give him more time to focus on this fund alongside comanager Akiva Felt; in June 2024, Franklin hired a research associate to help McCullough and Felt with various tasks. Nothing is changing about the fund’s strategy. The managers want to own stocks that are trading below their long-term value, which they estimate via a detailed sum-of-the-parts analysis of the firm’s drug pipeline. The managers aim to keep the portfolio of roughly 100 biotech stocks balanced between large, established firms and smaller, riskier names. This fund is more tilted toward small caps than one of its main peers, Fidelity Advisor Biotechnology, but not as much as Eventide Healthcare & Life Sciences, whose portfolio consists almost entirely of small- and micro-caps. The inherently volatile nature of biotechnology stocks means that this fund often goes through dramatic swings in performance. In 2021, the managers bet against Moderna and its coronavirus vaccine, causing the fund to rank near the bottom of the health Morningstar Category and badly trail the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index when that stock skyrocketed. In 2023, on the other hand, the fund trounced the category and the benchmark thanks to big gains by such holdings as Insmed, Merus, and Applied Therapeutics. Over the longer term, these extremes have balanced each other out, so that the fund’s performance has looked unremarkable. Even after the great results of 2023 and 2024, the fund’s A shares have trailed both the category and the Nasdaq benchmark over the past 10, 15, and 20 years through Sept. 30, 2024. |
Morningstar Pillars | |
People | Average |
Parent | Average |
Process | Average |
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