Only one of top five best-performing Australian equity funds from 2019 was able to have similar success in 2020.
According to FE Analytics, Hyperion Australian Growth Companies was the third best-performing Australian equities fund in 2019, with a return of 34.04%. For 2020, it returned 33.31% – a nearly identical return despite 2020 being rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The average return for the Australian equities sector was 3.95% in 2020, compared to 2019 which returned 22.56%.
DDH Selector Australian Equities was the best performer in 2019 and returned 39.21%, but only returned 4.86% for last year.
DDH Selector High Conviction Equity had returned 35.32% in 2019 and 3.42% in 2020, IOOF MultiMix Australian Shares returned 31.87% in 2019 and 4.7% in 2020, and IOOF Specialist Australian Shares returned 31.87% in 2019 and 4.72% in 2020.
Hyperion’s top holdings as of 31 December, 2020, were Afterpay, Wisetech, Xero, Fisher & Paykel and Domino’s Pizza.
At the end of 2019, its top holdings were REA Group, CSL, Cochlear, Domino’s Pizza and Macquarie Group.
Over the year, the fund’s holding in CSL had decreased from 9.6% to 6.65%, as the biotechnology company was popular with successful funds in 2019 where it returned 50.78%, but had only returned 3.73% in 2020.
Four of the top five holdings were also its top contributors during the rolling 12-month period.
Afterpay had returned 303% over the year, which included dropping to a low of $8 per share during the March sell-off, before reaching a high of $122 at the end of 2020 and had now seen a high of $156 this year.
Xero returned 83.53%, while Domino’s Pizza returned 68.4% and Wisetech returned 31.8%.
Despite the high return, it was a volatile year for Afterpay as the stock saw potential disruption from Paypal and the banks looking to enter that part of the market.
However, the stock had seen growth in the Australian, US and UK markets, which included sales records broken during Black Friday/Cyber Monday across all regions.
“Afterpay released a trading update for the month ended 30 November, 2020, reporting underlying sales growth of 112% to $2.1 billion,” Hyperion said in its end of year update.
“Referrals to retailers were up 147% with Afterpay generating 35 million leads for its merchant partners during the month and 1.2 million on Black Friday alone.
“Geographically, US underlying sales rose 186% to $1 billion, overtaking the [Australia and New Zealand] segment for the first time.
“US active customers grew by 1 million, taking the total number of customers that have signed up to Afterpay in the US to over 13 million.”
Performance of 2019’s best-performing funds for 2020
