Paris, April 15,2013 – The quantitative asset manager TOBAM today announced that it has launched its existing Anti-Benchmark Canadian Equity strategy under the format of a UCITS IV Fund. The fund has been launched with seed funding from a major canadian institutional investor.

The Anti-Benchmark Canada Equity Fund seeks to maximize diversification across the investment universe, as represented by the S&P/TSX Composite Equity index, by applying TOBAM’s patented Maximum Diversification approach, bypassing the sector, country and styles biases that more traditional allocation methods such as market-cap weighting can lead to.

By maximizing diversification in the canadian equities investment universe, where the index is highly concentrated in sectors including Energy, Materials and Financials, the fund aims to deliver the full equity risk premium to investors. The fund aims to outperform the S&P/TSX equity cap-weighted benchmark by 4-6% per annum over a market cycle, while at the same time delivering significantly less volatility (typically 30%).

The fund mirrors the Anti-Benchmark canada equity strategy that TOBAM has run since April 2011. Since inception as of end of Q1 2013, the Anti-Benchmark Canada equity strategy has returned +13.7%, outperforming the index (-5.6%) by close to 10% on an annualized basis. Over the same period, the strategy reduced volatility vs.the index by 33%.

Christophe Roehri, Head of Business Development with TOBAM, noted that ‘TOBAM has been working extensively with leading Canadian institutional investors who are invested in the Anti-Benchmark strategy for global and emerging market equities. we have launched this fund in response to demand from both Canadian clients seeking to improve the efficiency of their exposure to Canadian equities, often invested passively.”

Yves Choueifaty, President of TOBAM, observed that ‘Local and international investors in the canadian market are coming to the realization that buying the cap-weighted index is not a neutral position. On the contrary, the Canadian market-cap weighted index carries heavy biases and concentration risk that investors can avoid. The Anti-benchmark approach makes particular sense in the Canadian market, as it allocates accross risk factors and expands -meaningfully- the amount of diversification captured compared to a traditional index.”