Guinness Global Investors has launched a real assets fund for Mark Brennan, who joined the firm from Foresight Group earlier this year.
The Guinness Global Real Assets fund takes a quality-focused approach to holding listed infrastructure and real estate companies that operate assets across sectors including utilities, transportation, communications, digital infrastructure, data centres and healthcare.
Brennan was previously one of the lead fund managers on the Foresight listed infrastructure funds before leaving the firm in December 2023.
Brennan said: “The listed infrastructure and real estate opportunity set is global, diverse, and set up for a long-term renaissance driven by consistent flows of capital and secular tailwinds.”
While the last few years of rapid rate tightening have put pressure on asset-heavy business models, Brennan said with macro conditions now normalising they are seeing high-quality real asset owning companies providing stable and growing income, and resilient earnings growth.
He added that the Irish-domiciled fund also provides “a natural inflation hedge for investors” with its lower correlation to wider markets “a defensive form of diversification”.
Edward Guinness, CEO of Guinness Global Investors, said: “We have learnt that it is critical to focus on identifying high-quality companies to include in our funds. We achieve this in particular by having an analytical emphasis on sustainable free cashflows rather than yields and by assessing each company on its individual merits rather than investing thematically in specific infrastructure sub sectors."
