URTH - LGI: Decent But Imperfect Way To Play The Strength In Foreign Markets

2025-05-28 16:53:56 ET

Summary

• LGI offers high income (10.86% yield) and global equity exposure, appealing to income-focused investors seeking better yields than major indices or bonds.
• Despite strong yield and decent international diversification, LGI's NAV has declined YTD and it underperformed global benchmarks on a price-return basis.
• The fund is underweight to the United States relative to the MSCI World Index, which is nice given that foreign markets are outperforming domestic ones.
• The fund's distribution is currently covered by realized gains, but ongoing NAV weakness raises risk of a future distribution cut if performance doesn't improve.
• LGI trades at a moderate discount to NAV, but peers offer deeper discounts; overall, it's a reasonable choice for total return, but not the most compelling value now.

The Lazard Global Total Return and Income Fund ( LGI ) is a closed-end fund that provides investors with an interesting way to gain exposure to global equities along with a very high level of income. This is something that could potentially be very advantageous to retirees or other investors who wish to earn a high level of current income from their assets. After all, most of the major equity indices have very low yields right now. We can see that here:

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