Offered exclusively through the Macquarie Professional Series, the Winton Global Alpha Fund has once again been awarded the Money Management/Lonsec Fund Manager of the Year award for the alternative investments sector.
The managed futures hedge fund was highly praised by Lonsec for its well diversified portfolio, which takes positions in exchange-traded futures contracts over share indices, bonds, interest rates, currencies and commodities worldwide.
“Lonsec regards Winton as a high quality manager and believes it has competitive advantages in the quality and track record of its founder and head of research David Harding and the extensive resources the firm has to apply to research and development to ensure its systems remain leading edge,” Lonsec said.
Winton Capital Management head of Asian sales Charles Allard said the manager currently employs 100 scientists in the fields of database construction, numerical simulation, statistics and portfolio construction.
“The investment objective is to achieve long-term capital appreciation through compound growth – investing through Winton is a marathon, not a sprint,” Allard said.
“This goal is achieved by pursuing a diversified trading scheme across more than 100 futures markets and does not rely upon favourable conditions in any particular market, nor on market direction.”
He said Winton’s trading system is “dynamic and constantly evolving”, depending on such factors as changes in the liquidity or volatility in markets or the long-term expectation of market interrelationships.
“Winton is more technical than fundamental in nature. We have built a trading system robust enough to survive such market dislocations,” he added.
Winton’s approach is evident in its strong returns (+10.4 per cent), outperforming its managed futures (hedged) peers and the broader alternatives sector, according to Lonsec’s review.
Runner-up, Colonial First State Aspect Diversified Futures Fund said that its success over the past couple of years has been due to investors’ continued concerns over the future of equity markets.
“We’ve seen that both in the success of our deposit products but also an alternative product like Aspect where the returns are not correlated to the equity markets,” said Graham Hand, Colonial First State general manager for funding and alliances.
“The retail take-up [of Aspect] has been exceptional for something that you would consider to be a non-traditional asset class.”
Hand said the change in investors’ perception of the role of alternatives in the portfolio construction process has also had a positive effect on the interest generated in the fund.
Like Winton, Aspect has a strong commitment to research, and this is reflected in the over 140 staff located in its headquarters in London. Hand added that the most compelling prospect of its research team is that they are strictly focussed on managed futures.
Coming in third-place in the alternatives sector is AQR Wholesale Delta Fund. AQR Capital Management head of institutional business Australasia Jeff Dunn said that unlike other hedge funds, the Delta Fund explicitly hedges market exposure.
“The fact that the industry has not been able to deliver uncorrelated assets is not actually a problem with the underlying strategy, but a problem with the structure that they're actually run – they're not hedged properly,” Dunn said.
“It's certainly been a big part of how we've been able to deliver on what people are actually consuming from the alternatives portfolio and making sure that we're doing that in a transparent way.”
