BNP Paribas Asset Management has launched a fund that will invest in the nuclear energy industry.
The fund seeks exposure to companies involved in the nuclear energy value chain as it aims to capture a multi-decade investment opportunity, driven by growing global electricity demand and energy security concerns.
It will tackle the sector in three pillars – nuclear fuel, including uranium mining and enrichment; energy generation, including power plant operations and technologies; and specialised engineering or related services.
The strategy will use a scoring system that combines in-depth fundamental analysis, with a proprietary artificial intelligence model to enable large-scale scanning of companies’ activities, ultimately selecting stocks that maximise the portfolio’s relevance to the nuclear energy sector.
The fund’s global allocation universe covers approximately 3,000 liquid companies across three main regions – Europe, North America, and Asia – weighted through quantitative optimisation and quarterly rebalancing.
Vincent Berard, Head of BNP Paribas Global Markets’ Product Strategy for Theam Quant Funds, said: “We realised an untapped opportunity to deepen the initial investment universe beyond the somewhat limited scope of public market indices and existing products on the market.
“These tend to be heavily concentrated on uranium miners, essentially correlating investment returns with uranium prices, which ultimately under-represents this sector’s full investment potential.
“This is why we chose to take a much more diversified view of the entire value chain, which promises higher returns within traditional portfolios.”
