Attractively Valued Stocks Emerged as Market Retrenched

Attractive opportunities have emerged in the equity market retrenchment at the end of 2018. These conditions suit our investment approach as they allow us to buy strong high-quality businesses and to diversify the portfolio. We increased our positions most in defensive sectors, such as utilities and real estate, and reduced them in the more cyclical sectors. However, the decline in cyclicals did not deter us from assessing high-quality opportunities with durable earnings that emerged there. On balance, we are tending to find more attractive opportunities in companies that have a more defensive profile or where we believe the market misunderstands the fundamental outlook and unfairly penalizes the company. At the same time, we continue to seek a relatively balanced portfolio in terms of exposures to possible economic scenarios, so that our relative performance is not dependent on a particular "macro" environment.

We altered our positioning by:

• Raising our exposure to utilities, now our largest overweight, initiating in Iberdrola
• Moving to an overweight in real estate, adding Great Portland Estates
• Reducing our underweight in materials, investing in Koningklijke DSM
• Slimming our overweight in industrials and business services

Raised Exposure to Utilities, Now Biggest Overweight

We increased our exposure to utilities, which is now our biggest overweight. We are overweight in the gas and multi-utilities industries, where we hold Italian names Italgas, a natural gas distribution company, and Hera, a public utility company. We also hold Red Electrica, a partly state-owned and public limited Spanish corporation that operates Spain's national electricity grid.

• We initiated an investment in Iberdrola, a Spain-based integrated utility company, taking advantage of weakness in the share price, which is driven by regulatory uncertainty. The company is attractively valued, provides a steady income stream, and should benefit over the longer term from its position in the decarbonized renewables and electricity transmission markets. It also has a potential pipeline of new assets extending beyond 2025.

Moved to Overweight in Real Estate

As we seek to maintain a balanced portfolio to counter the impact of market volatility, we raised our exposure to the real estate sector by adding UK office developer Great Portland Estates (GPOR). Our other investment is in Aedas Homes, a Spanish house builder with a large land bank.

• We believe GPOR, which operates in central London, is undervalued by the market. The management team has an excellent track record, the balance sheet is strong, and the values of its office assets are being underestimated. We believe there is a high probability that GPOR will return capital to shareholders after a successful disposals program.

Reduced Underweight in Materials

We increased our allocation to materials, a sector that we have not favored largely because we did not like the business models of many companies within it. However, when opportunities to own high-quality companies arise, such as in the current market retrenchment, we are happy to invest in them. To this end, we opened a position in Koningklijke DSM, a leading vitamin maker and performance materials business.

We currently own France-based Air Liquide, a large international industrial gas company; Corbion, a Dutch biobased ingredients company operating in the food and biochemical sectors; and Johnson Matthey, a specialty chemicals company that is also the world's biggest auto catalyst maker.

• We took advantage of share price weakness to invest in DSM. We believe the business is becoming more stable and focused on growth, thanks to the acquisition-driven transformation program. In our view, improving organic growth, an effective cost and capital efficiency program, and the end of the headwind of falling vitamin E prices should drive a share price recovery and outperformance.

Reduced Overweight in Industrials and Business Services

We reduced our overweight industrials and business services amid signs that the European economy is losing momentum, a less favorable environment for this cyclical sector.

We continued to adjust the composition of our holdings, taking advantage of the market decline to sell companies that have underperformed and invest in high-quality businesses with strong industry positions and durable earnings that are now more realistically valued.

We sold out of CNH Industrial, one of the world's largest capital good companies; Trelleborg, a Sweden-based engineering company that develops polymer sealing solutions and wheel systems; and Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch print and digital publisher, after a strong run.

In terms of industry, our largest weight is still professional services companies. We own Bureau Veritas, a France-based international certification agency, and Experian, the leading global provider of credit information with operations in 17 countries, and we swapped Wolters Kluwer for RELX, the world's leading publisher of science journals and a provider of risk assessments on transactions with retail customers. Electrical equipment and aerospace and defense are also overweights. In the former, our biggest position is Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation. In the latter, we also hold Dassault Aviation, another French company.

• We started investing in RELX because we believe the market underestimates the quality and sustainability of growth at the risk business, which provides one of the leading online identity verification tools. It should benefit from the recent acquisition of the ThreatMetrix, one of the leading electronic devices databases. We also believe the risks around the science publishing business are overdone.

• We sold our position in CNH Industrial because slowing economic momentum and increasing uncertainty in the agricultural sector about the possible impact of tariffs and trade disruptions could further curb sales growth in the main divisions. We exited Trelleborg as signs of weakening demand and emerging risks in the automotive agricultural and industrials segments could, in our view, weigh further on the share price after a period of underperformance.

Maintained Health Care Overweight; Exited Fresenius

We have retained our overweight allocation to the health care sector amid the market uncertainty, which favors defensive sectors. We sold Fresenius, a provider of health care-related products and services, and sister company Fresenius Medical Care after both companies issued a second surprise profit warning in the space of two months. Neither company now expects net income growth in 2019.

We hold sizable positions in pharmaceuticals, with overweights in two Swiss companies, Roche Holding and Novartis, a manufacturer of health care and nutritional products. We also hold Getinge, an off-benchmark Swedish medical technology company with product areas such as surgery, intensive care, infection control, and patient handling.