S&P Assigns Four-Star ‘NEW’ Rating to AXA Emerging Markets Fund

Standard & Poor’s Fund Services today assigned its four-star ‘NEW’ rating to the AXA Emerging Markets Fund. The fund is a long-only active equity strategy that was launched on July 1, 2010.

The fund is managed by AXA’s joint venture in Australia with AllianceBernstein. The Australia-domiciled fund invests in equal proportions into two underlying FCPs, Luxembourg-domiciled fund structures. These funds represent the AllianceBernstein emerging market growth and equity strategies. A rebalancing is triggered when the allocation reaches 55%/45% in favour of one strategy or the other.

The fund will typically hold a total of between 180 and 210 stocks and offers broad-based large-cap exposure to the asset class.

“While this fund is a new offering in Australia, the emerging markets blend strategy has a successful track record going back to 2001. The underlying value and growth strategies have track records going back even further to 1996 and 1991, respectively. The AllianceBernstein team has demonstrated that the strategy is able to generate risk-adjusted returns consistent with the fund’s objectives over the longer term,” said S&P Fund Services analyst, Toby Lewis.

AXA has included provisions in the constitution to delay redemptions up to 365 days where the responsible entity deems the delay to be in the best interests of investors. “This added flexibility reduces the chances of the fund becoming locked-up under the terms of the Corporations Act, should the markets again experience the kind of stress that we saw during the global financial crisis,” said Mr. Lewis. “We view this as a sensible, pragmatic approach to protect against a marginal threat to investor liquidity.”

The fund affected by this announcement is: