Insights

While big institutional investors such as superannuation funds have long recognised the benefits of infrastructure as an investment option, retail investors often don’t believe they can readily access infrastructure projects without millions of dollars to invest ? but this shouldn’t be the case, says Sarah Shaw, CIO at 4D Infrastructure.

Sarah Shaw, Global Portfolio Manager at 4D Infrastructure, explores the connectivity between EM and infrastructure, addressing why the relationship is so positive. Given this, we believe investors seeking EM equity exposure should consider infrastructure as a portfolio allocation option.

This is the fourth in our series of Trip Insights. It follows a trip in April 2018 when Mark Jones, 4D Senior Investment Analyst, completed an extensive company engagement and calling program in Canada over two weeks, meeting with management teams from Oil & Gas Infrastructure, Regulated Utilities, Renewables, Rail, and Communications Infrastructure across a number of provinces and cities.

Inflation looks to be very slowly emerging from a long slumber and interest rates are heading north. This has significant implications for the world’s economy and global equity markets.

A cornerstone of our investment process is company management meetings and site visits. These meetings serve several purposes, including providing an insight into management—how they think and run their business—and whether management priorities align with ours as investors. Our Company Quality Grading process involves explicitly ranking company management, so first-hand contact is vital.

In December 2015, we published a paper looking at the need for infrastructure investment around the world and why we believed the private sector was going to be an integral component in how that growth would be funded.

This is the second in our series of ‘Trip Insights’, where we share those experiences. It follows a trip in September/October 2017 when Sarah Shaw, 4D’s Global Portfolio Manager and Chief Investment Officer, and Christopher James, 4D’s Investment Analyst, completed an extensive company engagement and calling program beginning in Hong Kong and continuing to Japan and the United States.

Sarah Shaw, Global Portfolio Manager and Chief Investment Officer, and Greg Goodsell, Global Equity Strategist, explain the benefits of investing in infrastructure and the specific opportunities available via the 4D Global Infrastructure Fund.

Sarah Shaw, Global Portfolio Manager and Chief Investment Officer at 4D Infrastructure, explains why infrastructure shouldn’t only be considered a defensive asset class.