Royal London Asset Management (RLAM) has won this year's equity manager award for its differentiated investment process utilising an Economic Return Framework and Corporate Life Cycle Concept.

Unlike many equity strategies, which have a large style bias and perform differently depending on the particular environment, without the manager having added any particular value, RLAM's flagship Global Select strategy focuses on bottom-up stock-picking.

Its portfolio of 25 to 40 stocks aims to deliver 300bps outperformance versus the benchmark over a five-year period, with the majority of alpha coming from stock selection which it rates as its key competitive advantage.

The company runs on the philosophy that structural imperatives in markets create an observable overemphasis on short-term information. Evidence of this is that shorter-term share prices are far more volatile than long-term business fundamentals.

Hence, it has focused on slow moving market inefficiencies by identifying companies with superior shareholder wealth creating strategies.

Incorporated into this is its environmental, social and governance (ESG) analysis which helps to improve the assessment process.

And the results have been strong—the strategy has outperformed the MSCI World index in 16 of the 19 calendar years since it was first developed. Indeed, even in the volatile pandemic markets, the Global Equity Select strategy has outperformed the MSCI World (net) index by over 3.5% per annum over the last three years.