AMP Life is seeding $10 million into the launch of the listed AMP Capital Global Infrastructure Securities Fund, which comes just days after the group nabbed three staff from competitor RARE Infrastructure.

While listed infrastructure as an asset class has had a chequered history in Australia, AMP Capital’s global portfolio manager Craig Noble is confident that the global nature of the fund – aimed at retail investors – will ensure good returns.

“We aim to outperform the index by a healthy margin – about 400bps,” said Noble at yesterday’s launch of the fund. Net of fees, this would be in the range of 200bps, added Trevor Cooke, chief operating officer of global real estate and infrastructure securities.

Noble said that AMP Capital Investors disagreed with the composition of other global infrastructure indexes (such as S&P’s, UBS Global, and Macquarie/FTSE) and so had developed its own index with Dow Jones.

This index, the Dow Jones Brookfield Global Infrastructure Index, gives much more weighting to the energy sector (pipelines and electricity) than the other three indexes, and also more weight to water and communications.