Fidelity Taps Firepower of Star Managers for New Mutual Fund

(Bloomberg) -- Fidelity Investments started a new mutual fund and tapped two of its most successful managers, William Danoff and Joel Tillinghast, to run it. There’s just one catch: it’s only available to Canadian investors.

Fidelity Global Growth and Value Class fund marks the first time the managers will run a fund together. The new product aims to achieve long-term capital growth by investing in companies anywhere in the world, according to a news release issued Thursday. It was created by Fidelity Investments Canada, which operates independently of the U.S. fund giant.

Danoff has run the $128 billion Fidelity Contrafund since 1990, and over that stretch has beaten the S&P 500 Index by more than 300 basis points a year. Tillinghast’s $36 billion Fidelity Low-Priced Stock Fund has topped its benchmark, the Russell 2000 Index, by more than 400 basis points annually since 1989.

By launching in Canada, Fidelity can avoid the risk that the fund would have spurred investors to pull money from other Fidelity products in the U.S., said James Lowell, editor of the Fidelityinvestor.com newsletter.

“It is likely they are worried about a flood of new money coming into what would be a no-brainer core holding for any investor” in the U.S., he said.

The new fund has attracted considerable interest from investors and “sales today are already strong,” said Chris Pepper, a spokesman for Fidelity Investments Canada. It has a management fee of 0.85 percent and an administration fee of 0.25 percent.

Fidelity’s Canada business manages about C$137 billion ($104.7 billion) in assets.

To contact the reporter on this story: Charles Stein in Boston at cstein4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Alan Mirabella, Josh Friedman

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