Legg Mason IF ClearBridge Global Infrastructure Income is targeted at investors with two primary objectives – reliable income generated from dividends of underlying holdings and capital growth above the level of inflation over five years. The managers seek to outperform the OECD G7 Inflation index by 5.5% over an investment timeframe of five years.

The fund invests in a diverse basket of global listed infrastructure assets in various sub-sectors such as water utilities, gas, electricity etc. The portfolio is also spread across different geographical areas, with the US, Australia and Canada the top three country weightings.

The fund is run by the highly regarded and well-resourced infrastructure team at ClearBridge Investments. It is co-managed by Nick Langley, Shane Hurst, Charles Hameih and Daniel Chu, who are based in Australia but regularly travel to their additional offices in the UK, Europe and North America. They also have the support of a team of analysts responsible for idea generation and ongoing monitoring of existing holdings.

The investment process takes into account both ‘top-down’ macroeconomic factors and ‘bottom-up’ fundamental stock-specific research. The team’s philosophy is that markets tend to misprice infrastructure assets over the short-term and there is a great opportunity set in taking a long-term valuation-focused approach.

The managers run a concentrated portfolio of around 40 holdings. Examples of holdings include the Spanish electricity grid corporation Red Electrica, and Brookfield Renewable which operates one of the world's largest renewable power platforms.

January 2021