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BlackRock, Monetary Authority of Singapore

BlackRock has announced that it has received approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and will launch a new equity fund.

The new offering – the ASEAN Systematic Active Equity (SAE) Strategy – BF1 Advantage ASEAN Equity Fund  – falls under the MAS’ Equity Market Development Programme (EQDP).

The EQDP is designed to strengthen the local asset management and research ecosystem while increasing investor interest and participation in Singapore’s equity market, BlackRock said in a statement yesterday. 

The fund, which invests across the ASEAN equity universe, including developed and emerging markets at similar sizes, is available to institutional investors and Singapore retail investors. It adopts a systematic, liquidity-aware approach with portfolio positions rebalanced regularly over time, designed to capture opportunities across a broad universe of securities by drawing on new information from vast, unstructured datasets. 

“ASEAN offers compelling equity opportunities, with Singapore as a key gateway to regional growth,” Filip Mena-Berlin, senior investment strategist and portfolio manager, Systematic Active Equity at BlackRock, said. “The strategy differentiates itself through a systematic, liquidity-aware approach that harness large-scale data and machine learning techniques to assess market dynamics across Singapore and ASEAN equities, supported by BlackRock’s global scale and disciplined risk management across market cycles.”

The portfolio typically holds 100 to 300 securities, with about half allocated to Singapore equities and focuses on small- and mid-cap companies where market inefficiencies can be more pronounced. The strategy also invests across other ASEAN markets, including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The fund, which is a fund of BlackRock Funds I ICAV, builds on BlackRock’s $20 billion Pan-Asian SAE franchise and its $334 billion global SAE platform. The strategy is managed by Ryan Kim and Filip Mena-Berlin.