Alliance Trust Japan Equity Fund is co-managed by Jonathan Bolton and Justin Atkinson. The Fund aims to be a core Japanese holding for investors, and to provide long-term exposure to key Japanese investment opportunities. The Fund's investment objective is to achieve long-term capital growth by investing in a portfolio of Japanese securities, including securities of Japanese companies which may be listed outside Japan. The Fund's benchmark is the FTSE All World Japan Index. The portfolio will typically be made up of 25 to 35 stocks.
The investment process is fundamental and driven by bottom-up of stock selection, combined with an overlay of top-down macro economic input. The key criterion that drives stock selection is quality of earnings, of balance sheets and of management. The macro input includes analysis of the domestic Japanese economy, and, in addition, the economies of Asia, the USA and Europe as these are Japan's key trading partners.
The managers believe that equity markets are reasonably efficient at pricing securities in the short term, and therefore seek to identify opportunities where they can enhance this shorter-term market information by adding their own assessment of a company's longer-term potential.
Fund Manager Profiles
| Jonathan Bolton |
Justin Atkinson |
 Jonathan is Head of Asian Equities at Alliance Trust Asset Management. After a three year Postdoctoral fellowship at Tokyo University, Jonathan joined Schroders as a Japanese equity analyst in 1987 and subsequently moved back to Japan in 1988. During an extended secondment his role expanded to include fund management and to head up the international division. After Asian roles at Dresdner RCM in San Francisco and TT International in London, Jonathan joined Alliance Trust in January 2009 to help develop the Japanese element of the portfolio within an Asian framework, and is a member of the Equity Strategy Team. |
 Justin joined Alliance Trust in May 2010 as an Asian equities analyst. He previously worked as an investment associate and legal counsel at the activist investing boutique Principle Capital. He successfully completed the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) programme to become a member of the CFA Institute in 2009. Before joining Principle Capital, Justin qualified and practised as a corporate lawyer at the international law firm Ashurst, including a secondment to the Financial Services Authority. Justin graduated with distinction from the College of Law in 2002 after graduating with an MA in Oriental Studies (Japanese) from Cambridge University (St John's College). |
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