The latest in investments and funds activity from across Europe.

Jupiter
Jupiter, the UK-based asset management firm that announced a few days ago that it has agreed to buy Merian Global Investors, has launched the Jupiter European Smaller Companies fund. 

Managed by Jupiter’s co-head of European Growth, Mark Heslop, the fund manager aims to achieve long-term capital growth by investing in small-cap European names (excluding the UK) which the manager believes will benefit from significant growth over the medium to long term.

The fund will sit alongside the almost £4.9 billion ($6.33 billion) Jupiter European fund and £1.7 billion Jupiter European Growth fund within Jupiter’s flagship European Growth Strategy. 

It adopts the same investment philosophy as the all-cap European funds: using bottom-up analysis seeking to identify high quality, high-return businesses whose equity is mispriced or undervalued by markets, exploiting this anomaly by aiming to generate market-beating returns.

The fund will invest in a high conviction, concentrated portfolio of about 50-60 smaller companies that are listed in or heavily exposed to Europe. These companies can be defined as any company that is, at the time of investment, smaller by market capitalisation than the 225th company in the FTSE World Europe (ex-UK) Index.

Heslop joined Jupiter in October 2019 from Columbia Threadneedle, working there for almost a decade.