Disciplined, repeatable investment process helps identify best opportunities

A high conviction, concentrated portfolio with a diversified risk profile, along with a strong focus on company fundamentals, has helped the Legg Mason Martin Currie Emerging Markets Fund grab the top prize in the Global Emerging Market Equities category at this year’s awards.

Martin Currie Investment Management’s head of emerging markets, Kim Catechis, said the fund employed a disciplined and repeatable investment process to exploit the market’s inefficient pricing of longer-term cash flow.

“We believe the best way to exploit pricing inefficiencies is to identify those stocks with the strongest share price performance potential based on fundamental analysis. However, we do not pick stocks in a vacuum, and are mindful of the fact that there is potential for even the most successful and established companies to be impacted by external factors,” he said.

India Avenue Investment Management’s managing director, Mugunthan Siva said the strength of the Equity Wholesale Class Fund, also nominated in this category, came from being a solely Indiafocused fund, an approach which aims to offer Australian and New Zealand investors exposure to some of India’s best companies.

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“I suppose that there are not that many India-based funds in Australia and I think it’s a growing area, and from our perspective we have built our business to give knowledge and research to clients, so they would become more comfortable around India and then consider investing in its market,” he said.

“We provide a lot of grassroots understanding about why one should invest in India and then try to explain that through the companies that we have in our fund.”

A bottom-up and country-driven approach aimed at exploiting overlooked macroeconomic and market-level opportunities worked well for the BT Wholesale Global Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund, recently rebranded as the Pendal Wholesale Global Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund, which was another nominee in this category.

London-based fund managers, James Syme and Paul Wimbourbe, said: “We believe emerging markets are more diverse than developed markets and that unlike the developed universe, emerging markets go right or wrong at the country level.”

“The fund offers a highly distinctive approach to the asset class, with our focus on top-down, country-level risks and opportunities. With the recent volatility in the global macroeconomic and political landscapes, this is an intuitively attractive way to invest in emerging markets, with a team who have generated strong long-term performance.”