Aviva taps Westwood’s Clott, Mato to manage absolute return strategy of Aviva convertibles fund

By Toni Weeks

San Luis Obispo, Calif., Sept. 11 – Aviva Investors announced it plans to enter into an agreement with Westwood Holdings Group, Inc. that would make Westwood the subadviser of the Aviva Investors Global Convertibles Absolute Return Fund.

According to a press release, David Clott and Shawn Mato, previously the lead portfolio managers of the fund, will join Westwood’s new global convertible securities team as lead portfolio managers.

Justin Craib-Cox will remain at Aviva Investors and continue to manage the long-only strategy of the fund.

“We believe our absolute return convertibles investors will be best served by this new arrangement as we strengthen our focus on scalable products and core building blocks that can feed into our new outcome-oriented, multi-strategy fund range,” chief executive officer of Aviva Euan Munro said in the release. “With David Clott and Shawn Mato continuing to advise the absolute return strategy at Westwood and Justin Craib-Cox managing our long-only strategy, our clients will be able to maintain seamless access to our global convertibles offering.”

Clott co-founded Aviva’s convertibles funds in 2002 and has co-managed both the long-only and absolute-return strategies at Aviva for 15 years, while Mato has co-managed those strategies for the past 13.

The fund seeks to achieve a positive return under all market conditions, taking long and short positions with a focus on shorter-date, high-quality, globally positioned issues. The portfolio managers seek to extract value through active security selection by identifying convertible bonds that offer a discount to their implied value, have an attractive yield, offer high liquidity and are large in issue size. In addition, part of the fund’s equity and credit exposure is hedged to manage risk.

London-based Aviva Investors Global Services Ltd. is the investment adviser to the fund.

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