There have been seven funds that have made drastic performance improvements since the last FE fundinfo Crown Fund Rating rebalance by receiving a 5 Crown rating in August, up from a 1 Crown rating in March.
The funds were APSEC Atlantic Pacific Australian Equity, AtlasTrend Online Shopping Spree, BlackRock Concentrated Industrial Share, Legg Mason Martin Currie Tactical Allocation, Macquarie Capital Stable, Pengana International Ethical, Reitway Global Property Portfolio.
The Atlas Trend Online Shopping Spree fund over the three years to 30 June, 2020, returned 44.65% and the fund’s founder and chief investment officer, Kevin Hua, said the fund had actually benefitted from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Atlas looks to set up funds that focus on big trends and thematics that were structural in nature and ecommerce and online shopping was one of them.
The Online Shopping Spree fund was launched in 2015 when 8% of global sales were online and now that had risen to mid-teens. Since the fund’s inception to 31 July, 2020, it has returned 77.76%, according to FE Analytics.
“Lately, the fund has killed it because of COVID-19 and thematic that people will shop online whether it is out of desire or necessity,” Hua said.
“There are names like Amazon, Walmart and Target that have benefitted from COVID-19.”
The fund, since the start of the year has returned 17.2%
Hua said what had taken the team by surprise was the adoption of moving to online sales from traditional offline stores like Walmart and Target.
“They’ve been able to grow online sales pretty aggressively and see it as a real growth part of the engine of the business and we bought the names hoping it would happen,” he said.
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the speed of change of these businesses especially since Walmart is a massive business. The fact that they’ve turned their business into really a partly online business has been pretty extraordinary over the last five years.”
During the global sell-off induced by the pandemic in March, Hua said the fund did not change much of their allocations as they picked positions for the long-term. However, the fund trimmed some positions in Amazon and Apple.
“One of the challenges going forward are valuations in terms of understanding how some of these valuations are going to be justified,” he said.
Looking towards the future, Hua said there were pockets of opportunities in more bespoke names focused on apparel, online food delivery, online streaming, and products of that nature.
