Life Cycle’s Rutter on joining the Pinnacle fold
Pinnacle Investment Management’s UK affiliate Life Cycle Investment Partners has shared details of its first global equities fund and where it is seeing investment opportunities.
Life Cycle was set up by a team of managers in the UK who previously worked together at Royal London Asset Management and focuses on global equities.
The firm, which focuses on global equities from a bottom-up perspective, was founded last year and has $2 billion in assets under management. Pinnacle has already stated there will be a “material increase” to the distribution team around this in the UK and Europe.
In a presentation, founder Peter Rutter said: “Coming across to Life Cycle, which we started in July 2024, nothing has changed around the core investment team or the process. The big change has been joining the multi-affiliate model that Pinnacle provides which offers the best of both worlds of a boutique firm combined with the scale and expertise of Pinnacle, which we think is an optimal structure.”
The firm’s Life Cycle Global Share Fund seeks to invest in the corporate life cycle where companies fit into one of five categories: accelerating, compounding, fading, mature or turnaround.
“We’ve spent 25 years refining five different stockpicking approaches, recognising that how you pick a winner in each of these categories requires different methods of analysis,” he said.
“We have a diversified portfolio but the key thing is we built Life Cycle diverse portfolios, so it doesn’t matter if value stocks are doing well or growth is doing well because we are there roughly neutral and we focus on only owning the best stocks in each. It’s that balance that drives the outperformance across multiple market conditions.”
One specific area he is observing at the start of the corporate life cycle is artificial intelligence (AI).
“There are some unbelievably interesting companies here that could change the world and our focus is on finding the ones that do well versus the ones that don’t. From our perspective, AI is a very real phenomenon not to be ignored or written off as hype. The danger is there is a lot of hype and a lot of valuation risk to watch out for.”
In its most recent financial results for the six months to 31 December, Pinnacle detailed it has seen growing interest from international investors.
International funds under management (FUM) were $44.8 billion across 40 countries outside Australia. This was a rise of 143 per cent from $18.4 billion during the half, but some $22.2 billion of this came via acquisitions of Pacific Asset Management and VSS.
Offshore net inflows were $0.8 billion during the six months to 31 December 2024, dominated by those from the UK and Europe.
It now has five offshore affiliates: Life Cycle Investment Partners, Aikya and Pacific Asset Management in the UK; and Langdon Equity Partners and Pacific Asset Management in North America.
AUTHOR
Laura Dew
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