The abrdn Global Private Markets Fund (GPMF) is a multi-asset solution that allows investors with liquidity constraints to invest in a diversified portfolio of private assets.

An allocation to GPMF gives investors a unique opportunity to diversify their portfolio exposure, strengthen resilience, potentially reduce volatility, and generate additional returns by accessing a whole new set of opportunities across all private market asset classes. Dr Lulu Wang, Portfolio Strategist at abrdn, will look at how investors can build a carefully constructed and truly diversified portfolio of private assets guided by Long-term and Tactical Asset Allocation, and how to mitigate risk through a private market lens. GPMF can be used by investors as a one stop shop solution or as a core building block as part of a wider private market’s exposure.

Workshop Objective: Explore how to construct and efficiently implement a diversified allocation to private markets.

Company Profile: We invest to help our clients create more. More opportunity. More potential. More impact. We offer investment expertise across all key asset classes, regions, and markets so that our clients can capture investment potential wherever it arises. By combining market and economic insight with technology and diverse perspectives, we look for optimal ways to help investors navigate the future and reach their financial goals. And by putting environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations at the heart of our process, we seek to find the most sustainable investment opportunities globally.

This presentation will focus on debunking common myths about evergreen funds, highlighting their potential for attractive returns due to the fully paid-in structure and the benefits of compounding over a typical 10-year holding period. We will demonstrate how careful portfolio construction in evergreen funds enables them to deliver institutional-grade investment content and asset allocation. Additionally, we will explore how evergreen funds cater to a wide range of investors, from private individuals seeking access to private equity investments, to large institutional investors. The session will emphasize the flexibility and long-term advantages of evergreen funds, showing how they can effectively meet the needs of various investor profiles while providing a sustainable and scalable investment approach.

Workshop Objectives:
•    Introduce EQT
•    Role of Evergreen Funds in PE

Company Profile: EQT is a purpose-driven global investment organisation focused on
active ownership strategies. EQT has a track record of almost three decades of delivering consistent and attractive returns across multiple
geographies, sectors and strategies. Uniquely, EQT is the only large
private markets firm with investment strategies covering all phases of a
business’ development, from start-up to maturity. EQT has more than
EUR 240 billion across 45+ active funds within three business segments
– Private Capital, BPEA EQT and Real Assets.

In the pursuit of uncorrelated returns, some investors are increasingly sacrificing liquidity and transparency. However, there are limits to how and where these less-liquid strategies can be deployed. Liquid alternatives continue to offer a compelling solution as either a replacement or a complement to less-liquid alternative strategies.

First Trust applies a disciplined, rules-based approach to target uncorrelated returns in liquid global fixed income and currency markets. The strategy leverages carry, valuation, and momentum factors to generate uncorrelated returns without forgoing liquidity or transparency. The First Trust FactorFX UCITS ETF, has shown to consistently deliver attractive returns with low correlation to both equity and fixed income markets, illustrating the lasting value of liquid alternatives for investors’ portfolios.

Workshop Objectives: To demonstrate how liquid alternative strategies, using disciplined factor-based approaches, can provide uncorrelated returns without sacrificing liquidity and transparency. 

Company Profile: First Trust is a privately owned U.S. based financial services firm established in 1991. Our mission and approach are simple. We aim to offer investors a better way to invest by providing transparent and innovative solutions - through knowing what we own, investing for the long term, employing discipline and rebalancing our portfolios.  
 
These core principles are taken into consideration in all aspects of our business and are the building blocks of our reputation. It is through these principles that First Trust’s specialist investment managers apply a robust and disciplined approach to a range of methodologies. We have a strong track record in providing a variety of rules-based, thematic and actively managed strategies investing across a range of equities, fixed income and alternatives.  
 
In delivering our message, our regional sales teams work closely with prospects and clients to distribute First Trust’s range of single-country, regional and global solutions across the world. 

Private equity secondaries gives investors the opportunity to gain private equity exposure and can serve as a useful diversification tool to actively rebalance portfolios. Potential benefits of a secondary strategy include: broad diversification, potential for earlier cash returns, reduced investment risk and mitigation of primary J-curve. Growing PE inventory and turnover have buoyed the secondary market since 2017, along with an LP need for liquidity, creating a strong opportunity for high quality secondary managers to generate attractive risk adjusted returns. The demand for private asset like returns from the wealth channel has driven the adoption of open-ended, semi-liquid strategies and PE secondaries, due to their fast settlement and quicker paydowns, could be an ideal asset class to be housed within these wealth focused fund structures.

Workshop Objectives: Understand the dynamics of the secondaries market, asses the current opportunity set and explore how semi-liquid vehicles can capture the underlying returns while providing increased liquidity to investors.

Company Profile: Franklin Templeton 
At Franklin Templeton, we offer our clients a gateway to investment excellence backed by a global organization and delivered through a consistent, coordinated client experience. We’ve broadened our capabilities by attracting leading public and private market investment managers to our firm. Today, we are among the world’s largest asset managers, with offices in major financial markets, serving clients in more than 150 countries and managing nearly USD 1.6 trillion in assets*.
 
Alternatives by Franklin Templeton
Alternatives by Franklin Templeton was created to break down barriers to alternative investments, providing an important source of returns for more investors. Our clients can access a diversified platform of alternative asset capabilities backed by specialist investment managers with deep expertise in private credit, private equity, real estate, hedge funds, and digital assets. With over 40 years of experience in alternatives investing, we manage USD 256 billion* in alternative assets, making us a trusted partner in this dynamic space.

*As of 31 March 2024

In this presentation, we offer a primer on how Evergreen Funds work and what makes them such an attractive option for private-market investments. Looking at both typical funds and Neuberger Berman’s own offerings, we set out their key features in comparison with traditional private equity fund structures and exchange-traded, closed-ended investment trusts, from the investment strategies they pursue, to the pace of capital deployment and valuations, liquidity profiles and ticket sizes. Our Evergreen Fund portfolios are built on co-investment foundations, with minority allocations to secondaries. We explain how co-investments can lower fees, raise the average quality of managers within the portfolio, bring a double layer of due diligence to each investment and enable a flexible, opportunistic approach to asset allocation—making them the ideal building blocks for Evergreen structures.

Workshop Objectives: Explore the structure and benefits of Evergreen Funds, comparing them to traditional private equity and investment trusts, emphasizing co-investment advantages and flexible asset allocation strategies in private-market investments.

Company Profile: Neuberger Berman was founded in 1939 to do one thing: deliver compelling investment results for our clients over the long term. This remains our singular purpose today, driven by a culture rooted in deep fundamental research, the pursuit of investment insight and continuous innovation on behalf of clients, and facilitated by the free exchange of ideas across the organization.
As a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager, Neuberger Berman is structurally aligned with the long-term interests of our clients. We have no external parent or public shareholders to serve, nor other lines of business to distract us from our core mission. And with our employees and their families invested alongside our clients—plus 100% of employee deferred cash compensation directly linked to team and firm strategies—we are truly in this together.

Do headline discounts matter when investing in secondaries? 
During this presentation we will look at why headline discounts may have limited information value and could be a poor indicator of final performance. 
We will discuss what really matters, recent developments in the LP stake market including the evolution of trading volumes and headline pricing, and where potential pitfalls lie in LP stake assessments. 
Join Ralph Büchel, Global Head of Secondaries, for a riveting conversation on what our team sees are the real indicators of final performance: timing, information advantage, concentration of portfolios and structural elements, among others. 

Workshop Objectives: To understand why headline discounts may have limited information value and could be a poor indicator of final performance.  

Company Profile: Unigestion is an international specialist asset manager with $17bn* in assets under management and 10 offices across Europe, North America and Asia. Unigestion’s award winning private equity team offers four key private equity strategies focused on secondaries, directs, emerging managers and climate impact. The team seeks to invest in the champions of tomorrow, selecting exciting, hard to access companies with resilient profiles across seven themes – climate transition, resource efficiency, sustainable cities, service efficiency, future of work, personal wellbeing and healthcare re-engineered. Unigestion believes that better and more consistent investment decisions can be made by harnessing the power of mind and machine and has applied its proprietary AI technology - PEpper – to private equity investments since 2020.