Objective and Strategy

The fund pursues long-term growth by investing in 30-50 undervalued global stocks.  The managers look for four characteristics in their investments:

1. A high quality business
2. A strong balance sheet
3. Shareholder-focused management and
4. The stock selling for less than it’s worth.

Generally it avoids small cap caps.  It can invest in emerging markets, but rarely does so though many of its multinational holdings derived significant earnings from emerging market operations.   The managers can hedge their currency exposure, though they did not do so until the nuclear disaster in, and fiscal stance of, Japan forced them to hedge yen exposure in 2011.

Adviser

Artisan Partners of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.   Artisan has five autonomous investment teams that oversee twelve distinct U.S., non-U.S. and global investment strategies. Artisan has been around since 1994.  As of 3/31/2012, Artisan Partners managed $66.5 billion of which $35.8 billion was in funds and $30.7 billion is in separate accounts.  That’s up from $10 billion in 2000. They advise the 12 Artisan funds, but only 6% of their assets come from retail investors

Managers

Daniel J. O’Keefe and David Samra, who have worked together since the late 1990s.  Mr. O’Keefe co-manages this fund, Artisan International Value (ARTKX) and Artisan’s global value separate account portfolios.  Before joining Artisan, he served as a research analyst for the Oakmark international funds and, earlier still, was a Morningstar analyst.  Mr. Samra has the same responsibilities as Mr. O’Keefe and also came from Oakmark.  Before Oakmark, he was a portfolio manager with Montgomery Asset Management, Global Equities Division (1993 – 1997).  Messrs O’Keefe, Samra and their five analysts are headquartered in San Francisco.  ARTKX earns Morningstar’s highest accolade: it’s a Five Star star with a “Gold” rating assigned by Morningstar’s analysts (as of 04/12).

Management’s Stake in the Fund

Each of the managers has over $1 million here and over $1 million in Artisan International Value.

Opening date

December 10, 2007.

Minimum investment

$1000 for regular accounts, reduced to $50 for accounts with automatic investing plans.  Artisan is one of the few firms who trust their investors enough to keep their investment minimums low and to waive them for folks willing to commit to the discipline of regular monthly or quarterly investments.

Expense ratio

1.5%, after waivers, on assets of $149 million (as of March 31, 2012).

Comments

Can you say “it’s about time”?

I have long been a fan of Artisan Global Value.  It was the first “new” fund to earn the “star in the shadows” designation.  Its management team won Morningstar’s International-Stock Manager of the Year honors in 2008 and was a finalist for the award in 2011. In announcing the 2011 nomination, Morningstar’s senior international fund analyst, William Samuel Rocco, observed:

Artisan Global Value has . . .  outpaced more than 95% of its rivals since opening in December 2007.  There’s a distinctive strategy behind these distinguished results. Samra and O’Keefe favor companies that are selling well below their estimates of intrinsic value, consider companies of all sizes, and let country and sector weightings fall where they may. They typically own just 40 to 50 names. Thus, both funds consistently stand out from their category peers and have what it takes to continue to outperform. And the fact that both managers have more than $1 million invested in each fund is another plus.

We attributed that success to a handful of factors:

First, the [managers] are as interested in the quality of the business as in the cost of the stock.  O’Keefe and Samra work to escape the typical value trap by looking at the future of the business – which also implies understanding the firm’s exposure to various currencies and national politics – and at the strength of its management team.

Second, the fund is sector agnostic. . .  ARTGX is staffed by “research generalists,” able to look at options across a range of sectors (often within a particular geographic region) and come up with the best ideas regardless of industry.  That independence is reflected in . . . the fund’s excellent performance during the 2008 debacle. During the third quarter of 2008, the fund’s peers dropped 18% and the international benchmark plummeted 20%.  Artisan, in contrast, lost 3.5% because the fund avoided highly-leveraged companies, almost all banks among them.

In designated ARTGX a “Star in the Shadows,” we concluded:

On whole, Artisan Global Value offers a management team that is as deep, disciplined and consistent as any around.  They bring an enormous amount of experience and an admirable track record stretching back to 1997.  Like all of the Artisan funds, it is risk-conscious and embedded in a shareholder-friendly culture.  There are few better offerings in the global fund realm.

In the past year, ARTGX has continued to shine.  In the twelve months since that review was posted, the fund finished in the top 6% of its global fund peer group.  Since inception (through April 2012), the fund has turned $10,000 into $11,700 while its average peer has lost $1200.  Much of that success is driven by its risk consciousness.  ARTGX has outperformed its peers in 75% of the months in which the global stock group lost money.  Morningstar reports that its “downside capture” is barely half as great as its peers.  Lipper designates it as a “Lipper Leader” in preserving its investors’ money.

Bottom Line

While money is beginning to flow into the fund (it has grown from $57 million in April 2011 to $150 million a year later), retail investors have lagged institutional ones in appreciating the strategy.  Mike Roos, one of Artisan’s managing directors, reports that “the Fund currently sits at roughly $150 million and the overall strategy is at $5.4 billion (reflecting meaningful institutional interest).”  With 90% of the portfolio invested in large and mega-cap firms, the managers could easily accommodate a far larger asset base than they now have.  We reiterate our conclusion from 2008 and 2011: “there are few better offerings in the global fund realm.”

Fund website

Artisan Global Value Fund

RMS (a/k/a FundReveal) provides a discussion of the fund’s risk/return profile, based on their messages of daily volatility, at http://www.fundreveal.com/mutual-fund-blog/2012/05/artgx-analysis-complementing-mutual-fund-observer-may-1-2012/