IOOF’s new additions to the five Crown pantheon were MultiMix Moderate, MultiSeries 50, MultiSeries 70 and MultiSeries 90.
This was in addition to their previous five Crown rated funds which it had managed to retain; Strategic Cash Plus, Specialist Property, Balanced Investor Trust, MultiMix Balanced Growth and MultiMix Growth.
Dan Farmer, chief investment officer for IOOF, said the firm’s diversified fixed interest portfolios had been comprehensively reshaped over the last couple of years.
“We’ve moved away from benchmark-focused managers and looked to more absolute return strategies focused on relative value and more opportunistic investment strategies,” Farmer said.
“We’ve had a strong allocation to direct property, we manage direct property internally and that portfolio has had strong returns over the years which has helped all those funds,” Farmer said.
“We’re active with how we position our asset allocations and timeframe is important, we tend to look at a 12-18 month horizon.”
For IPAC and Macquarie, which had 12 and 10 five Crown rated funds in the rebalance last September, these fell to four and five respectively, although the majority of the funds only fell one place to four Crowns.
The IPAC funds that retained their five Crown rating were Select Index Growth, Select Index High Growth, Summit Select Index Growth and Life Choices Index 85.
Seven IPAC funds dropped from five Crowns to four Crowns, those were: Diversified Investment Strategy 4, MMP High Growth, North Multi Manager Active Growth, North Professional High Growth, Select Index Balanced, Life Choices Active 100 and North Guardian Volatility Growth.
Stephen Flegg, portfolio manager at AMP Capital, said overall last year was still a good year for performance across the full IPAC range.
“If we look at the different ways we measure success, the first is in absolute performance and that was a good year, one of the best in the last decade, all of our flagship balanced funds were in the top half of their peer groups,” Flegg said.
“It was a challenging year for a lot of active managers… if you weren’t in the few big names that performed well, active managers typically underperformed.
“Our funds marginally underperformed the index, but we when look across the different metrics of how our diversified funds performed, so absolute performance relative to peers, we would characterise last year as successful.”
Macquarie’s five Crown funds were Balanced Growth, Australian Small Companies, Small Companies, Australian Shares and True Index Global Infrastructure Securities.
The funds that lost their five Crown ratings were Property Securities, Active Plus Equities, Wholesale Australian Equities, Australian Equities and Walter Scott Global Equity – all now four Crowns.
When asked about the performance of the now four Crown rated funds, Macquarie declined to comment.
