Union Investment has extensive equities capabilities offering a range of long-only strategies across global and regional markets. 

We believe a long-term approach is crucial to maximise opportunities in the equity markets. A clear focus on individual stock selection is the main source of alpha. As an active equity portfolio manager we conduct comprehensive fundamental analysis of companies with the prime objective of selecting stocks that add value to portfolio returns on a risk-adjusted basis.

Individual portfolio managers cover either global or regional sectors, ensuring coverage across the full equity universe. We put great emphasis on knowledge-sharing throughout the team to encourage idea generation, while avoiding the risk of knowledge concentration. Our portfolio managers’ responsibilities stretch from fundamental research to portfolio construction. The investment process contains a number of feedback loops designed to make the flow of information quick and efficient.

We have expertise in global, European, German and sustainable equities.

Despite the prolific rise of highly quantitatively driven investment strategies, algorithmic trading and passive buy and hold strategies, financial markets remain a field with heuristic investor behaviour that is not always rational. Sir Isaac Newton famously exclaimed in despair "I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people", as he lost a fortune during the South Sea Bubble of the 18th Century. Given that human participation in financial markets is so embedded it is no surprise that they are subject to anomalies and behaviour that is driven by its participants. As a result, traditional theories of security pricing and markets have been rightly questioned as to their validity, particularly so has the "efficient markets hypothesis (EMH)" developed by the economist Eugene Fama in the 1960s. The EMH holds that a stock’s price at any moment reflects all of the relevant information about a company and other input factors and that the capital market as a whole acts completely rational. These characteristics would make it impossible to beat the market on a risk adjusted basis because share prices are always exactly what they "should" be, given what investors collectively know. Although research on the various anomalies that counter the EMH is varied and insightful, our goal with this brief paper is to touch on one, namely, the momentum factor which is probably one of the most documented phenomena (and thereby counter-EMH anomalies) in financial markets.