GEFF brings together a team of highly skilled global equity managers, carefully selected and blended to ensure their highest-conviction ideas are optimally balanced. The result is a differentiated, expertly managed portfolio designed to deliver strong, long-term equity returns.
Overview
Our equity investment approach for market concentration and active manager underperformance.
Our equity investment philosophy
Key is owning more of the high conviction ideas
WTW GEFF investment philosophy. For illustrative purposes only.
Our investment philosophy is grounded in the belief that, whilst most active managers underperform net of fees, genuinely skilled managers, who excel in company analysis and stock selection, do exist and can generate alpha beyond their fees. Further, we can identify these skilled managers through rigorous research and due diligence.
We employ high active share and concentrated portfolios to maximise the impact of manager skill on returns. This approach is supported by academic research and our own empirical work. We also seek to exploit the full opportunity set across global equities to provide the greatest freedom to uncover the best investment opportunities. To mitigate investment risks and adverse manager selection, we employ multiple managers to bring diversity and resilience to the portfolio and diversify factor risks such as style, sector, and region. At WTW, we prioritise delivering value for money to our clients by leveraging our scale to reduce costs and using our relationships with managers to create bespoke, cost-effective products.
Differentiated approach
High conviction
GEFF aims to provide investors with access to concentrated global equity portfolios that are highly differentiated from the benchmark. The underlying 10 to 20 stock portfolios only contain investments in which the managers have the highest conviction.
Low fees
We are able to negotiate competitive fees due to our brand and scale from pooling our high quality investor base.
Risk control
In isolation the returns from one of these concentrated portfolios can be volatile. We aim to control the volatility by selecting managers that have complementary approaches. We manage risks at the total fund level to ensure that it is relatively style, sector and country neutral. This seeks to support stock selection primarily driving returns.
Sustainability
We integrate sustainable investing considerations within our processes, including manager research, manager selection, portfolio construction through our net zero goal, and monitoring.
Investment objective
The investment objective of the fund is to achieve long-term capital growth through investment in listed equities.[1]
Fund facts
| Base currency | USD |
|---|---|
| Fund inception date | 17 August 2015 |
| Subscriptions | Daily |
| Subscription timings | Initial documentation to be received at least 10 business days in Ireland prior to subscription date |
| Minimum initial subscription | USD 15 million for treaty share classes USD 5 million for non-treaty share classes |
| Redemptions | Daily |
| Redemption timings | 1 business day notice in Ireland. Cash paid by T+3 |
| Regulator | Central Bank of Ireland |
| Legal form | UCITS |
| Structure | Common Contractual Fund |
| Manager | Carne Global Fund Managers (Ireland) Limited |
| Investment Manager | Towers Watson Investment Management Limited |
| Administrator | Northern Trust International Administration Services (Ireland) Limited |
| Depository | Northern Trust Fiduciary Services (Ireland) Limited |
Footnote
- More information on the Investment Objective and Policy of the Fund can be found in the Prospectus. Return to article
Disclaimer
- This document is based on information available to Willis Towers Watson at the date of issue and takes no account of subsequent developments.
- This material is intended for investors with long‑term investment time horizons.
- Towers Watson Investment Management Limited has approved this document for issue to recipients categorised as Professional Clients only.
Key risk warnings
- The value of all investments and the income from them can go down as well as up. This means you could get back less than you invested
- Changes in exchange rates may cause the value of investments to decrease or increase
- Tax treatment depends on the individual circumstances of each investor and may be subject to change in the future
- In exceptional circumstances units in the fund may become illiquid and investors may redeem their investments only as stated in the fund’s prospectus
Our focused equity credentials
$28B+Focused equity AUM across 5 vehicles
210+Global investors across pensions, corporates, foundations and wealth
30+Equity investment professionals
2008The year we started working with clients on focused equity portfolios
As of 31 December 2024. Source: WTW. AUM in USD.
Get more details about GEFF
View a collection of our key GEFF documents.
Equity portfolio management team
Funds