Driven by the continued shrinkage of corporate Canada through mergers and acquisitions and a domestic market that’s heavily tilted toward commodities, some Canadian equity managers have been injecting a lot more foreign content into their funds.

Others are avoiding any confusion by steering away from foreign stocks and concentrating on style purity in their Canadian-branded funds.

As the growing number of Canadian-anchored hybrids may be confusing for clients who naturally think their Canadian equity fund is investing in Canadian stocks, it’s important that advisors understand the composition of these developing “go-anywhere” funds when designing their portfolios.

One strong Canadian equity fund with a penchant for blending Canadian and foreign companies is Toronto-based AIM Funds Management Inc. ’s $763-million AIM Canadian Premier Fund, an offering that has been gradually retooled following some gut-wrenching losses in the midst of the tech bubble.

Compare this with the much larger and equally foreign $3.9-billion CI Signature Select Canadian Fund, sponsored by CI Investments Inc. of Toronto.

The CI fund has enjoyed first-quartile performance over the past five years, returning 22.9% in calendar 2005, 21% in 2006, and 3% this past year. The result is an average annual compound return for the five years ended Jan. 31 of 14.9%. The CI fund has suffered a 5.3% drop so far this year.

The AIM fund has done slightly better, posting annual returns of 29.3% in 2005, 17.9% in 2006, and 2.4% in 2007, for a five-year average annual compound return of 15.9% — also a first-quartile performance. Year-to-date, this one is down 7.2%.

As a result, both funds receive above-average, four-star Morningstar Canada rankings in the “Canadian-focused equity” category.

After a brief career with the Swedish navy, Clas Olsson joined AIM Capital Management straight out of university, working as an international analyst on the European and Canadian funds before taking the helm on this fund in 1997.

A growth manager who has moderated his approach, Olsson now places greater emphasis on the quality of earnings, steering clear of companies that are highly leveraged relative to their industry. He looks for two types of growth stocks. The first consists primarily of momentum plays that are growing faster than the market on the back of positive earnings revisions. The second category consists of core stocks that can grow steadily even in a recessionary environment.

CI’s Eric Bushell spent the early part of his career working for the former BPI Financial Corp., staying on when CI acquired BPI. A “growth at a reasonable price” manager, he uses a combination of big-picture factors and bottom-up stock-picking to construct his portfolio.

Looking first at credit markets to gauge the degree of risk to assume, Bushell favours companies with strong balance sheets, dominant market share and the free cash flow to allow them to be acquirers.

Despite different methodologies and having only a few major holdings in common, the level of position diversification between the two funds is somewhat similar.

Holding about 77 stocks typically, the AIM fund plants almost a third of its assets in the fund’s top 10 holdings. The CI fund’s approach is a bit more diversified, holding roughly 127 stocks, but the fund’s top 10 stocks account for 36% of assets.

Although Olsson does make adjustments in sector selection, his turnover rate is generally lower than Bushell’s. This is reflected in their tax-efficiency ratings — 100 for the AIM fund and 78 for the CI fund.

Bushell is also more willing to hold cash, which has been as high as 30% of assets under management from time to time. Recently, short-term cash was about 12.2% in the CI fund and half that for the AIM fund.

Increasingly, Olsson has been looking outside North America for value. Non-Canadian holdings now account for 38% of the AIM funds’ assets, virtually all of which are in international stocks. With such a large amount of foreign exposure, the rise in the Canadian dollar has hurt performance here as the portfolio is unhedged.

Bushell has been following suit, with 41% foreign content, split equally between U.S. and international stocks. He has been able to protect the CI fund through tactical currency hedging in recent years.

This hedge is no longer in place, however, so returns will suffer if the loonie rises further.

@page_break@Given the decision to move outside the country, it is not surprising that both funds should have reduced stakes in the commodities sector. With a below-market weighting in energy and materials, the CI fund typically has had considerable exposure to consumer and industrial companies and has been overweighted in financial services companies.

The AIM fund holds even fewer energy and industrial issues. Maintaining a modest bet on financials, it leans toward consumer and health-care stocks.

Both managers primarily invest in large-cap stocks, although Olsson has recently been investing in some mid-cap names. Both funds’ price/earnings and price/book value ratios are equal to or lower than those of most of their peers and the S&P/TSX composite index.

Given the differences in style and portfolio strategies, you’d expect these funds to exhibit varying risk profiles. They certainly have in the past.

At the height of the high-tech bubble, almost half the AIM fund’s portfolio was in technology stocks, with disastrous results. Management has instituted more stringent risk controls, including broader diversification and a greater willingness to trim positions more quickly when a stock’s price multiples peak.

The result has been a significant drop in the fund’s volatility in recent years.

As a result, the difference between the two funds is no longer as significant as it once was — but it still favours the CI fund by a slight margin. Both funds register higher volatility — 10.3 for AIM and 9.6 for CI — than the standard deviation of the median fund in the category.

These two funds’ relative Sharpe ratios indicate the CI fund has been the better risk-adjusted performer over the three-year period, although the results are identical over the past five years.

With largely parallel records in recent years, the gap between these two funds has closed somewhat.

However, Bushell’s ability to protect the CI fund against losses while not falling too far behind during market surges is noteworthy. CI Signature Select Canadian has landed in the top quartile roughly 75% of the time over all one-year periods, says Morningstar, suggesting it may still hold greater appeal for risk-averse investors looking for stability in a challenging environment. IE