Heptagon Capital, a London based $2.7Bn specialist asset management business, has announced the launch of a new Irish UCITS fund and has appointed Yacktman Asset Management Co. as its sub-investment manager.

Based in Austin, Texas, Yacktman is a long-only US Equity manager, which is 100% owned by its employees, and has over $5.5Bn in assets under management. Over $3Bn of the funds they oversee are in their US registered Yacktman Fund, the investment strategy, philosophy and approach of which this new Irish UCITS vehicle is based on.

Yacktman is headed-up by investment veteran, Donald Yacktman, who has a 40 year tenure managing US equities. Yacktman and his investment team manage the fund using a bottom-up, value-focused strategy with no benchmark constraints and a long-term time horizon, measured in years.

Commenting on the new fund, the Heptagon partners said, “We are delighted that we have been successful in bringing the proven investment management expertise of Yacktman Asset Management into an EU regulated fund vehicle, thereby allowing our clients, as well as the broad UCITS fund investor base, access to one of the truly outstanding US equity managers. While there is undoubtedly a place for index trackers within certain portfolios, we have always been wary of the extensive use of passive US ETFs among many European wealth managers and we felt we owed it to our discretionary clients, and to our institutional advisory investors, to identify exceptional talent that has proven to consistently outperform over the long term. We have never bought in to the common refrain that the US equity market is too efficient for traditional stock pickers to produce alpha therein, and the relative performance of Yacktman since 1992, is a clear reflection of this. Their willingness not to focus too closely on the benchmark is also an investment approach that appeals to us.”

Yacktman Asset Management’s Donald Yacktman said: “We are very pleased to bring our investment process to a wider geographical investor base through our sub-investment manager role for Heptagon’s Irish regulated UCITS fund vehicle. We are very impressed with the Heptagon team and are confident that we have found the right partners to help us deliver our investment approach to international investors”.