Lazard Asset Management launched a US small-cap equity fund as part of its growing UCITS range, seeded with $100m assets under management.
In a statement today (21 May) it said the fund will target independent inefficiencies across the US small-cap market by systematically combining multiple idiosyncratic alpha sources through an AI-enhanced investment process.
Managed by the US systematic equity team led by portfolio manager Oren Shiran, the UCITS fund will provide access to the Lazard US Systematic Small Cap Equity strategy, which has provided annualised net returns of 10.9% since its launch in 2015, the statement said.
Based in San Francisco, the team uses a proprietary quantitative model designed to identify and exploit persistent inefficiencies in the marketplace, such as competitive advantage, allowing the managers to re-evaluate the entire US small-cap market for opportunities on a daily basis.
Shiran said: "We have created an investment process designed to address the age-old problem of scale in small-caps, solving complex financial analysis by applying accumulated domain knowledge to a vast amount of data in real time.
"Our automated fundamental analysts are not black boxes. They have been developed over ten years to replicate a labour-intensive rigorous process, at scale, to drive returns."
The UCITS fund will typically hold 350 to 400 stocks with the objective of outperforming the Russell 2000 index over a full market cycle.
