Opportunity: Value investing

Finding value in high-valuation markets

Finding opportunities in today’s high-valuation, technology-dominated markets requires a disciplined approach from an experienced team.

Our BP Global Premium Equities strategy has been successfully doing just that for more than 20 years, across all market cycles.

Why invest in this strategy?

Global Premium Equities is a value investing strategy managed by Boston Partners, Robeco’s sister company in the US. It uses its time-tested ‘Three Circles’ approach, which seeks to find companies at the intersection of attractive valuation, strong business fundamentals, and forward business momentum.

This disciplined approach is also highly flexible, enabling the all-cap and unconstrained strategy to seek opportunities in companies across sectors, industries, regions, countries, and from small to mid and large-cap, anywhere in the world.

Bottom-up, not top-down

The strategy does not follow the herd and has a high active share, with bottom-up stock picking driving overweight/underweight exposures across sectors, regions, and all market caps. In recent years, Global Premium Equities has been significantly overweight to Europe and the UK, and significantly underweight to North America.

While the fund’s managers are always aware of the macroeconomic and geopolitical factors that drive markets on a daily basis, there is no top-down focus. Instead, they focus on selecting the best opportunities on a company-by-company basis, which has resulted in having an overweight exposure to European financials, for example, in the past couple of years.

Global Premium maintains a consistent investment approach that has withstood the test of time Christopher Hart, CFA
Christopher Hart, CFA
Portfolio manager, Boston Partners

Why value investing in today's market?

It can be difficult to find genuine opportunities in markets that for the past three years have reached new peaks almost every quarter, with much of it driven by Big Tech stocks and a rush into artificial intelligence. These high-multiple companies run the risk of turning into bubbles that rise and fall. Value investing offers an alternative approach based on facts, not emotions.

This disciplined approach has enabled the strategy to remain resilient across all kinds of business cycles and financial wobbles. These include the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession; the Eurozone crisis of 2012; the Covid pandemic and related recession; the Ukraine war and the inflationary spiral it caused, and more recent geopolitical disturbances. Global Premium maintains a consistent investment approach that has withstood the test of time.

Why Robeco and Boston Partners?

  • Robeco is approaching its centenary as an investor, founded in the Netherlands in 1929. Boston Partners has specialized in value investing for over 30 years, running all-cap, large-cap, mid-cap and small-cap investment strategies. Both Robeco and Boston Partners are part of the Japanese Orix Group.

    Global Premium Equities is one of four Robeco Boston Partners strategies. The other three are:

    • US Premium Equities – an all-cap, unconstrained strategy focusing on companies that trade on major US exchanges as well as the ADRs of non-US companies.

    • US Large Cap Equities – a bespoke, unconstrained strategy that looks for the best picks among U.S. large-cap companies with a market cap of above USD 2 billion.

    • US Select Opportunities Equities – a bespoke unconstrained strategy that focuses on US mid-cap equities with a market capitalization range in line with the Russell Mid-Cap Value Index.

    In addition, Boston Partners offers the Global Long/Short strategy, which can use shorting as a means to seek long-term capital appreciation.

  • Research driven

    Boston Partners uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to find the best picks. A quantitative screen ranks the universe of names across valuation, fundamentals and momentum, using metrics that have been back tested to ensure true representation of the desired metric. Fundamental analysts then conduct bottom-up research on each company.

  • Sustainability integration

    Finally, the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors and active engagement is standard practice for the Boston Partners, as it has been for Robeco since the 1990s. The UCITS strategies are classified as Article 8 under the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) in following environmental and social factors when considering investments and adhere to the Level 1 Robeco Exclusion Policy.

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