American Beacon and Vanguard outsource the management of sleeves of several of their funds to multiple management companies. Here we have two somewhat similar (midcap value) funds, VASVX and AACIX, each with three sleeves and two of those three sleeves outsourced to the same companies - Barrow, Hanley; and Pzena.
The funds do have a lot of overlap in their top holdings, but overall, not as much as I might have expected. (Perhaps that's because Vanguard only recently - 2014- added a third sleeve with Pzena?) The American Beacon fund is more volatile, but has performed somewhat better over every standard time period. They're more like cousins than siblings. But first cousins, second cousins once removed, or what? Just wondering how they might compare going forward.
FWIW, M* describes the third management company used by Vanguard, Donald Smith & Co., as deep value investors. The
AB prospectus supplement describes its third management company, WEDGE Capital Mgmt, thusly:
primarily focused on identifying unrecognized value among what it believes are high quality, market-leading companies, with a defendable competitive advantage, and market capitalization between $1 billion and $20 billion. The sub-advisor focuses on companies that meet initial value and financial quality parameters and employs what the sub-advisor believes to be comprehensive, qualitative and quantitative analysis to identify stocks that, in the sub-advisor's opinion, have unrecognized value.
