| The investment
strategy of the Fund is to provide investors with access
to investments in emerging markets. The Fund aims to
meet its investment objective through bottom-up stock
selection. Lazard’s Emerging Markets Investment
Team seeks to create value in this way by assessing
the trade-off between a company’s valuation and
its financial productivity.
The Team aims to pick the best companies from the emerging
markets universe based on their expected upside, which
is a function of valuation, sustainability and risk
control. The goal is to create a portfolio of emerging
market companies that is less expensive, yet has higher
profitability than the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets
Index.
We seeks to protect the Fund’s capital against
the risks associated with investing in emerging markets
by considering in our analysis the potential impact
of macroeconomic, political and corporate governance
factors on the each company prior to its inclusion in
the Fund. Also given consideration prior to purchase
is the impact this stock may have on the Fund’s
overall risk/reward profile.
Furthermore, in order to ensure some diversification,
the Fund operates under strict country and sector limits
to control exposures. No new security will be added
if the result is a breach of these limits, and the Team
will trim exposure as necessary to maintain these limits.
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