The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relevant to wealth advisors and their clients.

Brown Advisory
Brown Advisory, a Baltimore-headquartered global investment management firm with $173.5 billion in client assets, is bringing its US Small-Cap Fundamental Value Strategy to clients outside the US with a UCITS fund launch, at a time when they see an increasingly attractive entry point for value-oriented investing.

The new UCITS fund provides institutional, intermediary and retail investors outside the US with access to this strategy which has delivered annualised returns of 12.6 per cent gross of fees, 11.5 per cent net of fees, since inception in 2008, vs. the Russell 2000® Value Index return of 10.4 per cent over this period. The strategy has been managed by David Schuster since its inception and alongside this new fund, it remains available to investors as a US mutual fund and via separately managed accounts.

The strategy focuses on investing in US smaller companies that the investment team believe are mispriced relative to their intrinsic value, the firm said in a statement. The team seeks out both classic value opportunities and more complex or overlooked situations, where the market may not fully reflect a company’s long-term potential.

“The US remains a highly dynamic environment for innovative smaller companies, and we believe it offers a compelling opportunity set for disciplined, long-term, value-oriented investors,” Schuster said.

Walker Crips
Walker Crips, a UK provider of structured investments, has launched a new range of investment products designed to offer investors defined outcomes linked to alternative and thematic underlying assets.

The Alternative Edge range contains two structured investment products linked to distinct market themes:

The Magnificent Seven: the seven influential artificial intelligence and technology companies in the US – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla.

Gold
Structured investments are complex financial instruments linked to the performance of an underlying asset such as an index, interest rate or commodity. They are designed to offer diversification to investors without having to take on undue risk through the use of soft capital protection barriers, the firm said in a statement. Markets remain shaped by volatility, inflationary pressures and shifting rate expectations. As a result, investors are looking for more defined outcomes. Alternative Edge responds to that demand by offering investments with clear parameters around risk and return.

The Alternative Edge product range differs from Walker Crips’ existing range of structured investment products which are linked to traditional indices such as the FTSE 100 and S&P 500.

“With uncertainty continuing to shape markets, demand for defined outcome investing is growing. For this reason, we think now is a compelling time to launch these strategies,” Mark Jordan, head of Walker Crips Structured Investments, said. “Alternative Edge gives investors a way to access opportunities in gold and US tech, but with greater control over the risk and returns. The potential returns on these products are highly competitive, yet they are designed to preserve an investor's capital as long as the underlying assets haven't fallen by a specified amount.”

BlackRock Aladdin
US-based BlackRock Aladdin, a tech-driven platform, has announced new private credit capabilities available on Preqin, marking the first step in a broader effort to bring greater transparency, analytical depth, and a single connected view of data to the private credit space.

With an expansion of private credit data, benchmarks and analytics, Preqin Pro enables investors to analyse market trends, fund dynamics and underlying assets together, across closed-end funds, business development companies (BDCs) and semi-liquid vehicles, all within a unified research and analytics experience.

As private credit markets scale and diversify, clients are seeking clearer, more connected insights across liquidity, risk and performance. The latest enhancements to Preqin begin to address a market gap, delivering consistent, standardised intelligence across private credit that underscores BlackRock’s commitment to evolving its global platform to meet client needs across their entire portfolio.

“Private credit is becoming a core part of portfolios, but the data remains fragmented, making it difficult for investors to understand their risk and benchmark their performance,” said Kunal Khara, global head of Aladdin Product at BlackRock. “This expansion brings together Aladdin technology with Preqin and eFront data and analytics to create a more unified, transparent and robust view of private credit. It’s another step toward our mission to build a more connected ecosystem that helps clients better understand risk, performance and opportunity across their whole portfolio.”

The launch is the first in a series of product enhancements that will deliver Aladdin’s mission to help clients capture the expanding opportunity in private credit, aiming to bring a greater level of transparency through data, analytics and reporting across the whole portfolio. 

BlackRock Aladdin® – inclusive of the Aladdin platform, eFront®, Aladdin Wealth™, and Preqin – enables institutional investors to make more informed decisions by providing a common data language across the whole portfolio.