Mercury favours Japan

Merrill Lynch's offshore Japan fund is focusing on small cap stocks with management committed to Western concepts such as corporate governance and shareholder value. Hiroshi Tateda, manager of the Mercury Offshore Sterling Trust Japan Opportunities fund, said: 'Our style is bottom-up stock selecting with a thematic overlay,' he said. 'What happened in the US and the UK will happen in Japan in the next 10 years.' Tateda runs a bottom-up fund. It is described as a theme fund but those themes are actually a function of the stockpicks and are used as a risk overlay rather than a stockpickin...