Aus Unity launches Seres Asian equities fund

Australian Unity Investments (AUI) has announced the opening of the Seres Asian Equity Opportunities Fund for Australian retail and institutional investors.

Hong Kong-based Seres Asset Management was formed in 2009 as a joint venture with AUI, and has been running its Asian Equity Opportunities Fund for six months. The local currency version is now open to investments of $25,000 or more.

The fund will employ a long/short approach and is benchmark unaware. It will also assess small and mid cap companies as part of its bias towards growth opportunities.

Seres chief executive Evan Erlanson said that the fund would not exclude the Japanese market because it still contained some growth opportunities, but he added that Thailand and Indonesia were the biggest outperformers at the moment. He also identified Taiwan as a market that contained relatively few opportunities.

Increasing innovation in the region created opportunities, while more established markets such as China would begin outsourcing more services to nearby countries, further stimulating growth in the region, Erlanson said.

AUI chief executive David Bryant said it didn’t make sense that an average balanced portfolio in Australia would have a greater than 20 per cent weighting to Australian equities when the Australian market made up less than 2 per cent of global GDP, while Asia, which makes up around a quarter of global GDP, would get lumped in with unrelated markets such as Europe and the US in global equities and end up with a weighting of around 5 per cent of the total portfolio.