Take care of risk, the performance rewards will look after themselves

Valuation is the key driver of portfolio construction for New Star's Pan-European Equity fund, managed by Daniel White. White's team invests as if it is a buyer of private companies, seeking out those that appear cheap. When assessing a stock, White looks for qualities he believes the man in the street would seek if he were to buy a company. He says: "Portfolio constituents should be about buying fundamentally good businesses that consistently generate free cashflows, they should produce strong returns and they should be run by trustworthy managers. In particular, the fund has a bias to...