abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

March 2026

Overview

The fund is focused on generating a level of income, and some capital growth, by tracking the return of the constituents of the Bloomberg Global Corporate Screened Index (Hedged to GBP). The level of income on the fund is not guaranteed and will vary depending on prevailing interest rates and associated coupons (interest payments) available on these bonds.

Square Mile’s Expected Outcome

We believe a return that closely matches that of the Bloomberg Global Corporate Screened Index (GBP Hedged) is a reasonable expectation for this passive investment strategy.

Square Mile’s Opinion

We believe that abrdn has a very strong commitment to managing passive strategies. Our rating on this fund is based on our opinion of the suitability of the benchmark the fund tracks, the management group's commitment to operating passive strategies, the size of the fund, the fund's cost, and its good historical record of tracking its benchmark.

Investors should note that they are unlikely to attain the exact benchmark performance in this fund due to several reasons, including different tax rates applied to the fund and the benchmark, trading costs incurred by the fund, fees charged by the fund management group, the fund holding a small amount of cash and futures due to client flows, and differences in time from when the fund and benchmark are priced.

The Bloomberg Global Corporate Screened Index Hedged to GBP measures the performance of global corporate bonds. The benchmark typically has an exposure to UK corporate bonds that ranges from 3% to 5%, and a duration ranges from five to seven years. Because the index is hedged to GBP, investors will have little exposure to currency risk. The index excludes securities issued by companies that breach United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) principles as well as companies involved in controversial weapons, thermal coal, oil sands, shale energy, and tobacco.

The index applies a negative (exclusion) rather than a positive (inclusion) social responsibility screen. Therefore, the fund does not limit investments to only companies that are deemed to provide environmental, social, and governance (ESG) benefits. Consequently, this fund may fail to meet the requirements of some ESG investors. Such investors might be better suited to an actively managed fund where the manager, at least partially, selects companies based on the social benefits they provide. Overall, we believe this fund should meet the ESG needs of many investors.

Fund Manager’s Formal Objective

To generate income and some growth over the long term (five years or more) by tracking the return of the Bloomberg Global Corporate Screened Index (Hedged to GBP).

Outcome: Income	Domicile: UK
Active/Passive: Passive	Benchmark: Bloomberg Global Corporate Screened Index
Asset Class: Fixed Income	IA Sector: IA Global Corporate Bond
Yield: 3.96%	Fund size: £1,910M
Fund Manager: Undisclosed	Distribution Pay Date: February, May, August, November
Fund Price: 0.9 Pounds	Dividend Frequency: Quarterly
Currency of Share Class: GBP	Share Class Launch Date: 29/08/2017
NAV: 0.9 Pounds	Year end: 31/12/2025
Discount/Premium: 0.00%	Gearing: -
Permission to distribute from Capital: -	Fees charged: -

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abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

Asset Manager Overview

Following the August 2017 merger of Aberdeen Asset Management plc and Standard Life plc, Aberdeen Standard Investments was formed as the combined group's asset management arm. In 2021, the company's name changed to abrdn. Their headquarters are in Edinburgh, Scotland, but they have offices in over 40 locations worldwide. abrdn offers a wide range of investment solutions across various asset classes, including equities, fixed income, multi-asset, real estate, and alternatives.

Fund Manager/Team Overview

The Quantitative Investment Strategies (QIS) team manages assets across a diverse range of systematic products and solutions. These strategies include traditional passive indexation (equity and fixed income), sustainable indexation, enhanced indexation, smart beta, active quant using artificial intelligence (AI), and structured products using derivatives. The origins of the QIS team trace back to SWIP, which was acquired by Aberdeen Asset Management in 2014 and then merged with Standard Life plc in 2017 to form abrdn.

Investment Philosophy & Process Overview

The fund invests in physical securities and adopts a stratified sampling approach. A stratified sampling approach is commonly used when tracking a bond index with a large number of constituents due to the high transaction costs involved in purchasing every bond in the index.

The fund managers start by identifying the main risks that drive the performance of the index, such as credit risk, interest rate risk, time to maturity, as well as sector, industry, and geographical exposure. This analysis is then used as a framework for selecting securities that will result in a fund with similar risk/return characteristics to the index. Investors should be aware that a stratified sampling approach will lead to a higher tracking error gross of fees compared to a full replication approach, but net of fees, the results are generally similar.

By employing stratified sampling, passive funds can achieve a balance between tracking accuracy and cost efficiency, providing investors with an effective way to gain exposure to the fund's benchmark while minimizing expenses and tracking error.

The fund is priced and traded at 12:00pm. If the underlying market is closed, a fair pricing adjustment may be applied to align the fund with the expected price of the tracked index. Most of the time, fair value adjustments have no material impact on the fund's pricing operations. However, occasionally, when a market is closed, an event may occur that would materially impact prices. This was the case in February 2022 when Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to the suspension of all Russian stocks to international investors. Therefore, a fair price adjustment was applied by valuing all Russian securities at zero.

The fund is priced at a different time than the benchmark, which can slightly increase the tracking error and lead to notable differences in performance if there are market moves between when the fund and the benchmark are priced. This difference should then be eradicated the following day.

The fund can undertake stock lending activity, typically around 1-5% of the fund's NAV. Stock lending involves lending securities to another party and receiving income in return. Trades are usually conducted with another entity, often an investment bank, which introduces counterparty risk—the risk that the other party may renege on their agreement and fail to repay the stock in full.

abrdn has strong risk controls in place to protect the fund in the event of a default on any security lent. This includes strict over-collateralization requirements as well as third-party indemnification agreements. The fund's performance benefits from the income generated by stock lending, though the overall impact on the fund's performance tends to be limited.

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abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

ESG Integration

Asset Manager ESG Integration

abrdn became a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment in 2007, and at its last review it had an overall assessment score of 4 out of 5 for Investment & Stewardship. abrdn are a signatory to the UN Global Compact and the UK Stewardship Code. They have also committed to decarbonisation targets across their assets and expect a reduction of 50% by 2030 (against a 2019 baseline) as part of their commitment to the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.

Sustainability is seen as a strategic priority for the business and is actively promoted by senior management. The Sustainability Group is a centralised resource of 25-plus people responsible for promoting the firm's sustainability activities both internally and externally. The group is split into four sub-groups across sustainability insights (drive the firm's sustainability research), investing (build the frameworks and policies), active ownership (engagement and voting) and investment specialists (developing and delivering sustainability services to clients). As well as the centralised resource, the firm also has dedicated ESG analysts that are integrated within the investment teams. These individuals are key to embedding ESG issues into their team's investment decisions.

Each asset class business within abrdn must assess their own sustainability risks. To aid this, abrdn have created cross-asset class house scores on a company's management and performance in relation to ESG. The scores are a quantitative measure of a broad selection of company specific data points which are weighted according to materiality for a company's sub-industry classification. The scores are driven by external data as well as in-house analysis. Proprietary qualitative scores are also available, as is external data. Within fixed income, the ESG score focuses on a company's ability to repay debt. Whilst the business have made strides at integrating ESG across the firm they still have a way to go to achieve full integration across all assets.

abrdn vote all shares for which they have voting authority except where the owner instructs them not to. The central ESG function has oversight of voting globally and have demonstrated that they are comfortable voting against management where they feel it is in the best interest of investors. Engagement is seen as a central tenet of the firm's active investment approach. In addition to their regular and on-going company meetings they also undertake priority engagements based on company or industry news flow or where they are seeking to drive change on important issues. The firm believe that informed and constructive engagement helps foster better companies.

With respect to ongoing development, the firm are looking to the underlying investment teams to further demonstrate their sustainability and ESG risk analysis. The firm are also aiming to enhance the overall control environment around ESG risks.

Fund ESG Integration

The index excludes securities issued by companies that breach United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) principles as well as companies involved in controversial weapons, thermal coal, oil sands, shale energy, and tobacco.

Investors should be aware that the fund follows a benchmark that applies a negative, rather than positive, ESG screen. The benchmark will avoid 'sin' stocks but does not specifically seek to invest in companies that provide ESG benefits. Therefore, we must acknowledge that this is not the perfect solution from an ESG perspective. This fund will hold stocks that may not meet everyone's ESG criteria. Some stocks that investors might be surprised to find in an ESG fund need to be included to provide market exposure. Investors who seek to invest only in stocks with a positive ESG tilt may be better served with an active ESG fund.

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abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

Responsible Investing Approach

The index applies a negative, rather than positive social responsibility screen which has been developed by abdrn and Bloomberg. The index will exclude securities issued by companies that have breached the UN Global Compact principles as well as those involved in controversial weapons, thermal coal, oil sands, shale energy and tobacco.

abrdn have decided to track a benchmark that only excludes 'bad' stocks because they want to restrict capital to companies that they deem 'bad' and therefore provide extra capital to the remaining companies.

Investors should note that the index does not take into the account any positive environmental or societal impact, nor best practice governance procedures.

Risk Summary

The fund invests in fixed interest instruments, and the major risks are likely to be interest rate risk and credit risk. Interest rate risk is the risk that changes in interest rates and even interest rate expectations can lead to changes in the value of fixed income securities. Credit risk is the risk that a company may default on its debt and be unable to return capital to investors. Credit risk also includes the potential for widespread credit downgrades, which may not cause a company to default on its debt but can lead to falls in bond prices over the short and medium term.

In addition, investors should be aware that investing in passive funds, while eliminating many of the biases and potential misjudgements inherent in actively managed strategies, brings risks of its own. Like any fund, active or passive, this fund is exposed to market risk, which is the risk of loss due to adverse market movements. Investors are also exposed to the fact that the managers of the fund have little to no discretion regarding the timing of trades and the selection and sizing of holdings. Therefore, a sharp selloff in markets will lead to a sharp selloff in the fund's performance, as the fund managers have no flexibility to mitigate this.

Because this is a passive fund that tracks its benchmark, the fund's risk score reflects the nature of funds in the peer group (which includes active and passive funds) and not the fund itself. The fund's risk score of 3 indicates that within the peer group, there is an equal number of funds that are more and less risky than the fund’s benchmark.

The fund's performance, all else being equal, is likely to lag the index slightly over time due to the impact of fees. However, the managers will try to regain some of this by taking small views, where allowed, on the timing of purchases and sales following benchmark rebalances.

Additional Information

Annualised Return: 4.97%

Annualised Volatility: 4.98%

Max Drawdown: -5.27%

Max Gain: 4.70%

Max Loss: -3.91%

Sharpe Ratio: 0.80

Sortino Ratio: 0.83

(3 years data to last month end unless otherwise stated)

Qualitative Risk Assessment

	Significant	Potentially Significant	Not Significant
Equity Risk
Interest Rate Risk
Credit Risk
Exchange Rate Risk
Liquidity Risk
Emerging Markets Risk
Derivative Risk
Manager Risk
Gearing Risk
Discount/Premium Risk

For the full summary of the risks, click here

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abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

3 Year Rolling Sector Outperformance

Maximum Drawdown (Rolling 12 Months)

Calendar Year Performance To Quarter End

Period	Fund (%)	Sector (%)
2025	6.8	5.8
2024	3.5	3.5
2023	7.5	6.8
2022	-15.1	-12.1
2021	-1.3	-0.5

Value for Money

The fund's Total Cost of Investing (TCI) is in the second quartile of passive funds within its peer group. Over the long term, the fund has tracked its benchmark within a good range. Therefore, we believe that the fund represents good value for money.

OCF v Peer Group

0.12%

Transaction Costs v Peer Group

0.02%

TCI v Peer Group

0.14%

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abrdn Global Corporate Bond Screened Tracker B Inc

Rating Changes

The Square Mile ratings are reviewed every 6 months. For full details on the methodologies, click here.
For a full list of all Square Mile rated funds, click here.

Rating Changes over last 12 months	Time & Date rating changed

Disclaimer

This document is issued by Square Mile Investment Consulting and Research Limited which is registered in England and Wales (08791142) and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Titan Wealth Holdings Limited (Registered Address: 101 Wigmore Street, London, W1U 1QU).

Unless otherwise agreed by Square Mile, this factsheet is only for internal use by the permitted recipients and shall not be published or be provided to any third parties. This factsheet is for the use of professional advisers and other regulated firms only and should not be relied upon by any other persons. It is published by, and remains the copyright of, Square Mile Investment Consulting and Research Ltd (“SM”). SM makes no warranties or representations regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein. This information represents the views and forecasts of SM at the date of issue but may be subject to change without reference or notification to you. SM does not offer investment advice or make recommendations regarding investments and nothing in this factsheet shall be deemed to constitute financial or investment advice in any way and shall not constitute a regulated activity for the purposes of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This factsheet shall not constitute or be deemed to constitute an invitation or inducement to any person to engage in investment activity. Should you undertake any investment activity based on information contained herein, you do so entirely at your own risk and SM shall have no liability whatsoever for any loss, damage, costs or expenses incurred or suffered by you as a result. SM does not accept any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistencies herein. Unless indicated, all figures are sourced by LSEG Lipper (all rights reserved). Past performance is not a guide to future returns.

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