International Value

Description

Westwood has retained Lazard Asset Management a sub-advisor to the Westwood Trust International Value strategy. Tracing its history back to 1848, Lazard has long maintained a pre-eminent position in the world's financial marketplace. Lazard Asset Management LLC, an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Lazard Ltd., is known for its global perspective on investing and years of experience with global, regional and domestic portfolios. With more than 230 investment personnel worldwide, we offer investors of all types an array of equity, fixed income, and alternative investment solutions from our network of local offices in ten different countries. A team-based approach to portfolio management helps them to deliver robust and consistent performance over time.

Lazard International Strategic Equity is a focused, multi-capitalization strategy that seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing in companies with a combination of sustainably high or improving returns, at attractive valuations. The strategy opportunistically invests in non-U.S. securities, including emerging markets securities, based on fundamental bottom-up company research.

Process

Purchase Discipline

Lazard's buy discipline is based on the search for companies with high or improving returns at attractive valuations. Thus, when the portfolio management team considers a company for a potential purchase, it looks for:

• Sustainably high or improving financial productivity (high ROE, ROIC);
• Low valuations relative to market levels and peers;
• A differentiated view based on Lazard's proprietary research, which will drive the market to revalue the company.

Sell Discipline

Lazard's sell discipline is a very important component of the investment management process. Upon purchase each security is given a target valuation. Targets are reviewed and re-evaluated on a regular basis and performance is monitored daily. Strict adherence is given to the sell discipline. A security may be sold for any of the following reasons:

• Its price rises to a level where it is no longer believed to reflect value (target valuation);
• The underlying investment assumptions are no longer valid;
• An alternative investment idea is more compelling.

 

More Information

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