Fund Manager of the Year 2014: Equities (Long Short)

Winner

Platinum Japan Fund 

Finalists

Smallco Investment Fund

Perpetual Share-Plus Fund 

Taking the opposite route to its counterparts was instrumental in Platinum Japan Fund taking the Equities (Long Short) winning accolade at the Money Management/Lonsec Fund Manager of the Year awards, according to fund manager Jacob Mitchell. 

“At a time when the market was pretty much positioned in the opposite direction, people were generally going long the Yen. We took the opposite position.” 

Mitchell said this wasn’t a lucky gamble but a thoughtful approach. He believes a culture of industry and stock understanding at Platinum has resulted in repeated successes across all their funds.   

“Having freedom as an analyst to nut out very industry-intensive style work, and establish an edge from a bottom-up perspective, is important. At the same time, allowing a discussion around the macro to take place without stifling the bottom-up research has led to consistent returns across most of the funds that we manage.” 

Last year’s category winner Smallco Investment Fund said the fund’s consistency was crucial to its overall success and its selection as a finalist in this year’s awards. 

“This is the fifth year in a row that we’ve been included as a finalist,” managing director Rob Hopkins said. 

“The fund returned 37 per cent for the year to 31 December. The performance has consistently been very good. In the last five years the compound return was 29.3 per cent per annum,” said Hopkins. 

Keeping the consistency theme uppermost has also been important for finalist Perpetual Share-Plus Fund, according to fund portfolio manager Paul Skamvougeras, who said it had helped deliver a great year for the fund. 

“The Shareplus Long/Short fund has made it to the Fund Manager of the Year finals because of the consistent outperformance of the fund versus the benchmark over the last three years,” he said.  

“Other contributing factors have been the ability to leverage off the large analyst team at Perpetual, the rigorous process used to identify both long and short opportunities, and the experience of the team in shorting stocks and extracting alpha from the short positions.”