Fidelity Indonesia A-Dis-USD

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|21/07/2023

by Hunter Beaudoin
Fidelity Indonesia’s lead manager, James Trafford, and his quality-oriented investment approach show promise. However, we would like more time to observe how Trafford, a relatively young portfolio manager, applies his investment process through the market cycle. As a result, the strategy retains its People and Process ratings of Average.

Trafford took over this strategy and Fidelity Thailand from previous manager Madeleine Kuang in July 2021. Trafford has been with Fidelity since 2013 and carries 13 years of investment experience, the majority of which has been as a research analyst. His portfolio management experience began as a comanager on an internal energy mandate in February 2020, which he stepped off in early 2022. Trafford plans to offload his remaining stock coverage, which allows him to better focus his time on the management of this strategy and his Thai strategy. Research efforts are supported by a stable and well-resourced analyst line-up part of Fidelity’s Asia Pacific ex-Japan analyst team. Through our discussions, Trafford seems to be an astute stock-picker with intimate knowledge of his portfolio, though we still need time to build conviction in his ability to successfully steer this mandate and deliver alpha consistently.

Trafford brought a new investment process to this strategy upon his joining as lead manager. The strategy’s focus on company fundamentals remains intact, though Trafford has a stronger quality focus, and active share has increased to around 50% from 30-40% prior to his appointment. Trafford’s classification framework categorizes holdings as quality franchises, improving cyclicals, emerging disruptors, and yield opportunities, with the former two expected to compose the core of this portfolio. The framework is sensible, but we would like to observe how Trafford applies it in different market environments.

Over James Trafford’s tenure from July 2021 through May 2023, the clean Y-Acc-USD share class lagged its category benchmark, partly due to the outperformance of the large index constituents, such as Bank Central Asia, which the portfolio has a structural underweight in given UCITS rules that cap maximum individual stock positions at 10%. Encouragingly, the share class has led its custom MSCI Indonesia IMI 8% Capped Index over this period.
 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™A promising manager and investment approach, but it’s still early days.
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Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAverage
ParentAbove Average
ProcessAverage
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
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