Single product strategy for the win
The Fairview Equity Partners Emerging Companies fund won this year’s Money Management Fund Manager of the Year award in the Australian Small/Mid Cap Equities category.
The fund attributed its success to its single product strategy coupled with strongly-aligned interests and an equal say for all portfolio managers.
The small-cap fund, which has managed to deliver strong returns over several time periods, has been managed by a highly-experienced investment team who have been through all economic and stockmarket cycles, Fairview Equity Partners’ portfolio manager, Tim Hall, said.
“We are experienced fund managers with a combined 64 years in the market. With equal say in the portfolio, we all own each investment so the portfolio is not separated by sector responsibility. Moreover, we are equal business owners and are all participants in the fund so we have a very strong alignment with our unitholders,” he added.
“The fund has been running for 12 years, and it has solid consistent returns with top quartile performance over several time periods. Since the inception the annualised outperformance is 6.7%.
“We are very focused on a single strategy with very strongly-aligned interests and despite top quartile performance, we manage much less funds under management than many peers. We currently have capacity in the fund.
“Finally, our disciplined approach to stock selection is underpinned by our rigorous and repeatable investment process.”
Asked about the competitive advantage of his fund, Hall said it all came down to being a single product company and focusing on one fund only rather than having a number of separate funds such as micro-cap/mid-cap funds, global funds or a pre-IPO [initial public offering] fund.
Looking back over the last few months, Hall said that liquidity was crucial for the funds and successful funds should have been positioned in the way which allowed managers to react quickly to events such as this unprecedented period of market volatility.
Following this, he said, the portfolio of the Fairview’s fund had been repositioned more defensively and the fund’s increased its exposure to agriculture, consumer staples and gold.
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