Riyadh – Mubasher: The Global Saudi Equity Fund enjoyed strong performance in 2017, prompting it to become among the top five equity funds in Saudi Arabia.
Global’s Saudi fund also ranked second among the largest funds with assets under management in the Kingdom with SAR 502 million ($134 million) in 2017, Global Investment House Saudi (Global Saudi) revealed on Monday.
Launched in 2009 with the aim of investing in long-term projects, the Global Investment House’s (Global) subsidiary focuses on investing in stocks listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul).
The fund successfully outperformed the benchmark Tadawul All Shares Index (TASI), and logged 120.8% since inception, whereas TASI marked 50.9%.
The Global Saudi Equity Fund posted 5.8% in 2017, whereas TASI only achieved 0.2%, Global revealed, noting that this performance allowed its Saudi subsidiary to take its place among the top five best performing conventional equity funds in the Saudi market.
“The fund’s robust performance is attributable to the team’s research driven investment approach and vast experience in managing equities in the Saudi market. Our value-oriented investment process has proven to be successful,” the fund’s chief investment officer Badr Al-Ghanim commented.
Last month, Global’s asset management team issued their outlook for GCC equity markets for 2018.
The report indicated “a generally optimistic view ranging from slightly negative to moderately bullish across the board supported by more accommodative fiscal policies and undemanding valuations,” Global said.
Global Saudi’s senior fund manager Husain Thaker added on the same line that “While we were neutral to slightly positive on Saudi for the year 2017, we turned more bullish on the kingdom for [2018].”
