Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar, Voya's IGA, IGD, and IDE closed-end fund review. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items for today's event. Please join the presentation using your computer speaker system by default for audio. If you prefer to join over the phone, just select phone call in the audio pane and the dial-in info will be displayed. Please use the chat feature to send in any questions during the webinar and we'll be happy to address them during the Q&A. Today's webinar will be recorded and we'll follow up with a replay. I would now like to introduce Kevin Tarr, your moderator for today. Over to you, Kevin.
Great, thank you, Rachel. Welcome everybody and thanks for joining our webinar. Today we'll be reviewing Voya Global Advantage and Premium Opportunity Fund, ticker IGA, Voya Global Equity Dividend and Premium Opportunity Fund, ticker IGD, and Voya Infrastructure Industrials and Materials Fund, ticker IDE. My name is Kevin Tarr and I'm a product manager at Voya for our closed-end funds. Joining me today is Justin Montmany, a portfolio manager from our quantitative equity team who helps oversee our thematic enhanced index and smart beta strategies, along with Susanna Jacobs, head of strategy research for our Voya multi-asset strategies and solutions team and oversees the option portion of these three funds. Today for our agenda, we'll review the current closed-end fund market, our investment process, each fund's performance, our market outlook, and we'll end with Q&A. First, let me provide some background on Voya Investment Management and these funds.
Voya Investment Management is the asset management part of Voya Financial and oversees $342 billion in assets under management, including a little under $1 billion in closed-end fund AUM. Voya's closed-end fund lineup consists of five funds, all residing in the Morningstar derivative income category. We believe the strategies provide a unique investment opportunity by providing access to markets not widely available through other closed-end funds, combined with the income from options. All five have unique sector or geographic exposure and consist of a long equity portfolio with a call writing strategy on top. The beta and call writing differ by fund as dictated by their area of investment. The equity portion is managed by the Voya Equity team, which oversees $64 billion in AUM, including $25 billion in quantitative and quantamental strategies.
The options overlay is managed by the Voya multi-asset strategies and solutions team, which has deep expertise in managing and executing derivatives across their $43 billion in assets. The three strategies we're covering today are our two global funds, IGA and IGD, as well as our infrastructure fund, IDE. IGA and IGD were both launched in 2005 and were taken over by the current investment team in 2019. Prior to that, they were managed by a different sub-advisor. Both funds seek a high level of current income, while IGA has a secondary objective of capital appreciation. IGA and IGD are managed in a similar manner, which we will provide more detail on later in the call. IDE was launched in 2010 and the current investment team took over in February of 2019. IDE seeks total return through current income, capital gains, and capital appreciation.
I'd also like to note here that as of February of this year, both Steve Wetter and Vinny Costa were removed as named portfolio managers on all five of our Voya closed-end funds, while Justin and Susanna remain as the two named PMs. When turning to slide four, the graphic shown here illustrates the discounts of IGA, IGD, and IDE relative to the broader closed-end fund market since 2021. Overall, discounts have been through a meaningful cycle of narrowing, widening, and narrowing again over the past year- to- year and a half. For historical context, during the height of the COVID sell-off, the discounts of IGA and IGD widened to almost as much as 20%, but returned to narrower levels in mid to late 2021. Discounts widened back out in early 2022 and remain wide through 2023.
2024 was the beginning of a general narrowing cycle that has lasted through the beginning of this year. As global markets have outperformed U.S. markets to start 2025, this has resulted in the narrowing of discounts for our global closed-end funds. As of the end of April, IGA and IGD had discounts of -3.5% and -6.8% respectively, while IDE was in a similar range with a discount of -6.7%. There are a number of factors that impact discounts on closed-end funds, some of which we can control and some of which candidly we cannot. Performance is a driving factor and has been strong to start 2025. These funds are also approved for share repurchases, which Voya will implement if the funds are particularly wide. You can view our annual report for further information on our share repurchase executions.
Our goal around sustainable dividends and regular investor communication is intended to provide clarity to the market on our funds, which should help support trading and demand. If we turn to the next slide here, the table outlines the funds' distributions over the last 12 months. As noted on slide three, IGA and IDE previously had quarterly distributions, but as of May 2024, all five of our closed-end funds now have monthly distributions. Also in May 2024, Voya increased the annualized distribution rates for each fund to approximately 10-11% as a percent of NAV. The increase was intended to address demand in the market for higher distribution rates given the increase in market yields and competition from alternative sources of regular cash flows.
The combination of monthly payments with higher distribution rates, including potentially returning capital to investors at net asset value, aims to have the funds serve as an attractive regular source of cash flow for investors. Next, I want to review performance by the funds over the last year. You'll note that the market performance is greater than the NAV performance across all periods, which is consistent with the discount dynamics that I mentioned earlier. Over the last 12 months, IGA and IGD increased 14.7% and 15.4% respectively on an NAV basis and 23.8% and 22.4% on a market basis. Similarly, as of the end of April, IGA and IGD were both up year- to- date 4.9% and 5.9% on a NAV basis. Global markets outperforming the U.S. markets to start 2025 has contributed to the strong performance of both IGA and IGD year- to- date.
Justin will be providing more detail on the equity sleeve performance later in the presentation, and Susanna will be covering the performance of the options overlay. Shifting focus to IDE, the performance for the trailing 12 months period is 10.1% on a NAV basis, and year- to- date the fund is up 3.7%, also on a NAV basis. As a reminder, IDE focuses on infrastructure, industrials, and materials, so it has unique sector exposure with limited investment in energy. Over time, that lessens the volatility that energy can introduce. It also has less exposure to utilities than funds in the infrastructure category, which has helped lessen volatility with the recent rate changes. With that, I'll hand it over to Justin to talk about the equity sleeves.
Thanks, Kevin. I will cover the equity sleeves performance and process and then pass it along to Susanna, who will cover the derivatives sleeves performance. First, there were several changes to the portfolio management team for these products, which Kevin noted earlier. The equity sleeves of both IGA, the Global Advantage and Premium Opportunity Fund, and IGD, the Global Equity Dividend and Premium Opportunity Fund, utilize the same underlying equity model and have the same objectives. Both funds seek to maximize total returns while also generating higher income and have lower volatility relative to the MSCI World Value Index over a full market cycle. Our approach is sector and region neutral, meaning they will have the same exposure to economic sectors and global regions as our benchmark index.
Also, both sleeves target a dividend yield that is 15% higher than the benchmark while maintaining a lower beta in the range of 0.85-0.9. The main difference in the fund is that they employ slightly different derivative overlay strategies, which Susanna will discuss later. Stock selection for both sleeves is driven by our proprietary sector-specific multi-factor model. This model, which we call our core model, evaluates around 8,000 stocks globally. The core model was built and is maintained in-house and places varying degrees of emphasis on sentiment, valuation, company management, operational, and ESG indicators across sectors. Regarding performance, over the trailing one-year period ending April 30th, 2025, the equity sleeves outperformed the MSCI World Value Index by about 670 basis points on a growth-to-fee basis in both IGA and IGD.
All three of the strategies' main alpha drivers, the core model, the portfolio's higher dividend yield orientation, and the portfolio's lower beta orientation, contributed positively to excess returns. Part of this performance was offset by the portfolio's small-sized exposure as large market cap companies outperformed smaller cap companies in the period. Outside of factor exposures, the fund's individual investments in the industrials and healthcare sectors added value, while individual investments in the consumer staples and real estate factors detracted. Next slide, please. Thanks. First, again, as Kevin mentioned, there were a few changes to the portfolio management team also listed here. The equity sleeve of IDE, the Infrastructure, Industrials, and Materials Fund, provides thematic exposure across six GICS sectors: energy, industrials, information technology, materials, utilities, and communication services. One thing to note, though, is that only the subsectors in those sectors that are related to infrastructure are included.
The fund seeks to maximize total returns by investing in global companies that stand to benefit from increased government and private infrastructure spending. In our investment process, we attempt to maximize returns and provide thematic exposure while mitigating economic policy, interest rate, and crowding risk. We do this by maintaining sector and region neutrality so that we have the same economic and interest rate exposures as our custom infrastructure benchmark. Again, here, stock selection is driven by the same proprietary sector-specific multi-factor model as IGA and IGD. This model places varying degrees of emphasis on sentiment, valuation, company management, operational, and ESG indicators. Moving to performance, over the trailing one-year period, IDE's equity sleeve outperformed the custom benchmark by about 30 basis points on a growth-to-fee basis. The primary performance driver was strong performance from our core model, specifically our valuation, sentiment, operational, and management indicators.
This performance was offset by the portfolio's marginally higher beta as lower beta stocks outperformed higher beta stocks during the period and our industry positioning in the energy sector, particularly our overweights to oil services and drilling companies and our underweight to midstream companies. Moving outside of factor exposures, our individual investments in the companies in the utilities and information technology sectors added to performance, while our individual investments in the industrial sector detracted. With that, I'll pass it along to Susanna to go over the derivatives sleeve performance.
Thank you, Justin. The derivative strategies of IGA, IGD, and IDE are systematic in nature. We employ a call option overlay designed to capture the volatility risk premia by selling call options. The strategy's two main objectives are supporting the total returns of the fund and, two, enhancing the stability of the fund's returns. Additionally, IGA and IGD engage in foreign currency hedging designed to minimize the impact of currency rate fluctuations. We expect that the short call options will perform differently in various market environments. When equity markets are down, flat, or slightly higher, the short call options would likely contribute to fund returns. However, when equity markets move significantly higher, the call options may detract from the fund's total returns. The equity and option return streams are uncorrelated, thus providing some stability to the overall fund return.
For IGA and IGD, we expect the currency hedging will perform well when the dollar is strong. This slide summarizes the option strategy guidelines as well as the systematic design that we currently employ. Both IGA and IGD sell 1% out-of-the-money calls on 50% of the portfolio using indices and ETFs. We choose those ETFs because they have good market liquidity and they are highly correlated to the equity benchmark. IGA hedges 100% of non-USD exposure, while IGD hedges about 50%. IDE sells out-of-the-money call options on 35% of the portfolio using ETFs. Option performance for the one-year period ending April 30, April 30, was a modest detractor across IGA, IGD, and IDE largely due to strong equity markets over the past year, just as we would expect. The currency hedging detracted from IGA and IGD over the past year as the U.S. dollar has weakened.
On this slide, I will review the financial markets for 2025. U.S. stocks faced a downturn during the first quarter and delivered mixed results in April, following a low on April 8th. The S&P 500 has since recovered from its worst two-day performance since March 2020, which was sparked by trade tensions and President Trump's announcements of new tariffs. Large-cap stocks performed better than small-cap stocks, and value stocks outperformed growth stocks. On the other hand, U.S. bonds performed well, driven by growing concern over economic growth, which led to a flight to safety. Internationally, the results were more positive. Developed and emerging market equities both posted gains. Europe benefited from improving economic data, falling inflation, and increasing expectations of policy support from the European Central Bank and German government spending. Despite significant market volatility and policy shifts, the U.S.
Economy remains resilient, supported by a robust labor market, manageable inflation, and mixed company earnings. However, the introduction of new tariffs and their uncertain levels are complicating the economic outlook. This makes it challenging for companies to navigate the trade war and operate effectively. In such an unpredictable environment, forecasting becomes more difficult, and diversifying portfolios is essential to performing well under various scenarios. This slide, I will review the 2025 strategic investment themes. This shows our strategic investment themes for the year ahead. The major overarching macro driver has been political change. There has already been significant change to the political landscape. While we think uncertainty, mainly around trade, has likely peaked, the environment will remain fluid and volatility across asset classes will remain high. These shifts come as the U.S.
and global economy are slowing due to, one, lagged effects of tighter labor market monetary policies, two, the U.S. transitioning from above-trend growth, three, China deleveraging, and four, Europe's lack of domestic demand support. Given this backdrop, we expect asset class returns will be lower. We believe the impressive returns in the U.S. equity market over the past decade may lead to investor fatigue. This is particularly true given the high multiples and lingering effects of the Great Resignation. However, we think the U.S. equities continue to stand out versus the rest of the world due to superior innovation, shareholder-friendly practices, and strong corporate free cash flow. One of the keys to this view is inflation, which we believe will continue to trend lower.
Even if we get a price bump due to tariffs, we think offsetting forces, including weak immigration, softening rents, and depleted consumer savings, will keep inflation in a manageable range.
Great. Thank you, Susanna. Now turning to our Q&A portion, it looks like we did have a few questions come in. The first one looks like it might be for Justin. The question is, have you made any specific changes to the global strategies in response to the U.S. tariffs announced last month?
Good question, Kevin. In the strategies, both in IGA, IDE, and IGD, as I mentioned previously, we have a region neutrality, which we also try to keep the portfolios very close from a country perspective basis. We were largely immune from any drastic performance drag or any issues with regard to the tariffs because we are neutral relative to the benchmark on countries. We are always monitoring this exposure and have some of our own proprietary risk measures to try to measure this. Largely, it was not a large contributor there. The only really change we did make to the portfolio during the period of time when tariffs was after the large drawdown, we did slightly increase our beta, primarily because of existing research in the funds showing that as VIX levels become extremely elevated.
If you remember back around the time of the initial tariff announcements, the VIX got over 50. As a result, we increased the beta in the portfolio. That helped us win. Earlier this month, there was a reduction in the tariffs and a lot of it calmed down in the market with a large rebound.
Great. Thank you, Justin. We have another question here. It looks like this one is for Susanna. The question is, has the recent market volatility impacted how you're implementing your option strategy?
Good question. Thanks, Kevin. The call writing strategy was developed to support the total returns of the fund. This is expected over the long run and through various market cycles. During periods of market volatility, such as what we experienced in the recent past two months, March and April, as we rolled the options, we evaluated the strikes and the delta of the call options we rolled in order to continue to support the overall goal of enhancing the stability of the returns. Every time we rolled the option, we evaluated the risk-reward of the premium collected so that if there were large upside moves in the underlying asset, the call options would not be a significant detractor and would support the recovery of the equities portfolio.
So given that the option overlay is a systematic strategy, there aren't that many times that we deviate from the rules-based approach to how we roll the options. During periods of excessive market volatility, we do look at the risk-reward of the options that we roll. We look at the strikes and we look at the delta.
Great. Thank you, Susanna. Looks like another question here is about the team changes we had mentioned earlier. The question, maybe this one's for Justin, asks if the team changes mentioned previously have any impact on how the strategy is implemented.
Thanks, Kevin. They will have no impact on the way the strategy is implemented. Keep in mind this is a quantitative process. So we're following a model, and then the construction follows an optimization process that I've been running myself since I joined as a portfolio manager. There should be no expected changes in the implementation. We have a deep team in terms of training as well to help with regard to the construction and then the model building.
Great. Thank you, Justin. It doesn't look like any other questions came in. In closing here, we want to thank you for joining the webinar and your interest in Voya's Closed-End Funds. Voya is a committed partner in Closed-End Funds, managing close to $1 billion in assets. If you have any follow-up questions, please contact the email address shown on screen. Thanks again, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Thank you so much, and thank you to everyone for attending today's webinar, Voya's Closed-End Fund review. As a reminder, you will receive a follow-up email with a link to view a recording of today's webinar in a few days' time. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, everyone.