Marta Raga (Singular AM): “We allocate 40% of stock market assets to megatrends”

Singular Bank has a new leader at the head of its manager, Singular AM. The former Belgravia Capital has been led for a few weeks by Marta Raga, who has become the new general director and director of the firm after the departure of Gabriel Álvarez de Toledo. With a volume under management of 2,000 million, 1,025 million from the company itself and the rest coming from delegated management, among which UBS Gestión stands out, in this change of stage the objective has been set to “grow the business” and expand its range of products after 2023 that has served the brand to consolidate its activity.

“Being part of a project from the beginning helps you know where you have to grow,” he admits in an interview with La Información. Raga, who manages a team of 50 of the 400 that make up Singular Bank, focuses on the product catalogue, without ruling out new launches to those carried out this year, among which two target profitability funds stand out, taking advantage of the Bond interest rebound. “There are always opportunities for new products, although we have a complete offering,” she points out.

Among its preferences, one of Singular AM’s big bets is on megatrends, a niche that Raga believes “it can continue to do well.” “40% of our stock market assets are invested in megatrends,” he adds. Infrastructure, population aging and especially technological disruption are the topics for which he shows preference. In fact, he considers that despite the dispersion in the evolution of the indices this year, which is much more accentuated in the US stock market due to the momentum of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ (Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta ), the technology sector has attractive companies on the stock market, but they are “selective.”

“Being part of a project from the beginning helps you know where you have to grow”

“At the valuation level, the market is tight, but precisely the dispersion between the different sectors leads us to think that there are opportunities. 2024 can be a positive year for equities, as long as we act with caution, since the behavior of the stock market will be conditioned by the evolution of interest rates and bonds,” he clarifies. With all this, he admits that Singular AM is underweight in equities and that they have neutralized their position in the technology space.

“If you exclude the large values ​​from the Nasdaq, there are a mass of technology companies that have fallen a lot with very different valuations,” he points out. Banking is another area that Raga has on his radar for next year. In his opinion, the high interest rate environment will continue to favor the stock market, since the increase in the default rate and the fall in credit demand will not “excessively harm” these listed companies.

The same conviction continues for the debt market, in which it is also advisable to be prudent. “It is time to maintain duration in fixed income but we must remain vigilant to lengthen the portfolios. Bond yields have risen a lot and since then the market has remained stuck and with a lot of volatility,” he argues. Although he admits that the durations of Singular AM are still “moderate” with a strategy that does not exceed three and a half years, he recommends taking advantage of the ups and downs of the market to build portfolios, pending the course of inflation.

With 30 years of experience in the sector, she has been associated with Singular AM almost since its birth in early 2020, although she joined as director of discretionary portfolio management in mid-March 2020, in the midst of confinement. A period marked by the reorganization of client assets as a result of the change in taxation of SICAVs. “The asset management industry is growing quite a bit in portfolio management, because many clients from these vehicles have ended up transferring their investment to a traditional portfolio,” she adds.

In this context, venture capital has been one of the areas that has experienced the most growth as a result of this transfer, but it also detects a greater demand for other products such as ETFs, a niche in which Raga sees “a lot of potential.” greater sophistication of the Spanish investor, who has lost the fear of investing.” “ETFs are necessary to mitigate the margin of error,” he emphasizes, while defending that this type of product “is not going to steal the spotlight from active management.”