Australian small and mid-cap (SMID) funds have seen the biggest fall from grace in the ACS sectors over the past year, falling from best-performing sector in 2018 to one of the worst this year.
During the 2017/18 financial year, the ACS Equity-Small/Mid Cap sector returned 20.4 per cent but in the 2018/19 period, there was a significant reversal and returns fell to just 1.7 per cent, according to FE Analytics.
The most-commonly used SMID index, S&P ASX Small Ordinaries index, also suffered with returns of 1.9 per cent but the wider ASX 200 returned 11.5 per cent, more than six times its SMID counterpart.
There were only two out of the 37 other ACS sectors which performed worse than Australian SMID; Alternatives which returned 0.42 per cent and Cash-Australian Dollar which returned 1.36 per cent.
Within the individual small and mid-cap funds, around one third of them failed to report a positive return with the worst, Forager Australian Shares, losing nearly 20 per cent over the 12 months. However, returns were broad with the best-performing fund, SGH Emerging Companies, returning 21 per cent over the same period.
Overall average returns by managed fund sectors were smaller this year, the best performing Property- Australian Listed sector returned 15.3 per cent compared to the 20 per cent returns seen by the top sector last year.
Meanwhile, North American funds managed to maintain their strong performance, although the sector dropped slightly from second place last year to fourth place this year. During 2018/19, the sector saw returns of 12.6 per cent, a fall from 19.3 per cent in the previous year.
