Skandia chops Merrill, goes with global LPTs
Australian Skandia has dumped Merrill Lynch’s Australian share fund, and made a big initial allocation to global listed property, among menu changes that became available to investors on Monday.
The Swedish-owned platform provider has added five managers to its $2.8 billion platform, including two to the pre-mixed options that make up about $800 million of that total.
The SG Hiscock Lasalle Global Property Securities Fund has received about $15 million, in the wake of Skandia’s research team creating a 30 per cent offshore allocation in the listed property portfolio.
Skandia research head Will Burkitt said Stephen Hiscock’s team had “the longest track record in the industry”, and its global research partnership with real estate researcher Lasalle provided “significant competitive advantage”.
Also added to Skandia’s pre-mixed options is the MFS Fully Hedged Global Equity Trust, receiving an initial $15 million and bumping up the level of currency hedging within the multi-manager global equity portfolio to 50 per cent, according to Burkitt.
Skandia admired MFS’ strong convictions, Burkitt said, exemplified by its 20 per cent underweighting of US stocks throughout 2004.
The SG Hiscock and MFS portfolios have also been added to Skandia’s discretionary menus, along with the Perpetual Industrial Share Fund, the Ausbil Emerging Leaders fund, which is Skandia’s first ex-Top 50 option, and the AXA/Alliance Bernstein Global Value Fund.
On the removal of the Merrill Lynch Australian Shares Fund, Burkitt said harmony in the manager’s team had been undermined by recent changes to the way its analysts were remunerated.
“The idea was to make the analysts more accountable for performance, but now if the portfolio managers get it wrong then the analysts suffer also,” Burkitt said.
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