Seizing European opportunities

Dubai, UAE:  07 May 2014: The ingredients for a successful year in European equities are all here. Corporates have managed to clean their balance sheets and their trust in the future is rising – which is supported by good GDP growth projections for the region. Europe is however no longer trading at a discount, which is why the quality of earnings is important.

UBP’s European equities team’s current favorite themes concern the European recovery, value and restructuring – with a bias on domestic cyclicality, particularly within consumer discretionary, as well as on industrials and the midcap space.  

In the Middle East, UBP has offices in Dubai and Beirut.

UBP’s European Equities team has recently launched a European opportunities strategy focusing on the recovery in Europe's periphery and emerging high potential situations and stemming from two baskets that were launched in 2013. These companies have been exposed to the significant economic pressures experienced in peripheral Europe are undervalued and will benefit from the improving macro environment. The universe is limited to 25 to 40 stocks. The team has developed a track record since early 2013 of highly successful stock selection within these themes, delivering a 31.56% gross return since its launch in May 2013.

This newest launch completes other strategies, providing investors with a large range of solutions, whether they are looking for consistent performance, high yield or a defensive strategy:


The European equity strategy, which is one of UBP’s flagship strategies, is a high conviction portfolio of the team’s best ideas in the European stock market. The portfolio is comprised of 50-70 stocks with no neutral positions or underweights, which results in the high active share shown (i.e. alpha generation) in the portfolio. It is focused on themes such as e-commerce, mid-cap growth and restructuring stories, which has enabled the strategy to outperform its benchmark every year over the past three years with a 27.10% gross performance in 2013.


The Dividend+ strategy aims to provide income with very low volatility exploiting the dividend stream provided by blue chip European equities. Among the developed markets, Europe is the highest yielding market. With companies rich in cash, the IBES consensus is targeting a 6% increase in dividends in 2014.The strategy aims to benefit from this attractive attribute of the European stock market whilst isolating equity volatility by selling covered calls. With 22 stable income-generating stocks the strategy is an alternative to other yielding assets and has delivered a performance of 6.69% in 2013.

The team’s consistent outperformance has been generated by high conviction stock picking and a pragmatic approach with regards to style, adapting portfolios to suit all phases of the stock market cycle – they are active stock-pickers with a bias towards medium-sized companies, combining top-down and bottom-up research.