Performance, consistency and strong risk management
It is the quality, longevity and alignment of its team that helped the Solaris Long Short Fund (LSH) differentiate from competitors and earn the top spot in the long/short equities category at this year’s Money Management and Lonsec Fund Manager of the Year Awards.
The fund has a wealth of investment experience behind it, with its seven most senior team members having spent around 20 years with the fund, which was augmented by the alignment that comes with staff being both majority owners of Solaris and material investors in LSH with their own funds.
The fund attributed its win to the consistency of its performance, which exceeded its objective, and its strong risk management.
Solaris Investment Management’s chief investment officer and analyst, Sean Martin, stressed that investing confidence and consistent performance could be generated when a strong team had this stability, and had invested together over such a long period.
“Solaris has a strong risk management culture embedded into the investment process, which has been extended to LSH. Funds in this Long Short category have historically exhibited quite high-risk profiles enabling this characteristic to be a strong differentiator for Solaris and the fund,” Martin said.
Bianca Ogden, Platinum’s fund manager and a former scientist before she transitioned to fund management, said of her fund:
“One of the key differentiators for us is that, first of all, it’s healthcare, and the other thing is that we look very much deep into the science as well as these people who run these companies and trying to understand really what’s happening.”
Antipodes Partners, a pragmatic value manager and another finalist, said that one of the key differentiators for its strategy was the fund’s active approach to currency.
“Currency is a major issue for anyone investing internationally, of course,” Andrew Findlay, Antipodes Partners’ general manager, said.
“We have an active approach to managing currency while other managers just consider currency passively or ignore it completely. And that has proved to have the added value over time.”
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