Man Group launches Australian equity strategy



Man Group has announced the launch of a new investment strategy focused on the Australian equities market, Man Numeric’s Australia Core strategy, which will apply a combination of proprietary valuation and information flow stock-selection criteria.
Man Numeric’s head of international strategies, Ori Ben-Akiva said that the strategy would apply established quantitative investment processes to the Australian equities and would seek to maximise alpha for clients through bottom-up, systematic stock selection.
Additionally, it would aim to outperform MSCI Australia, with equities being identified from a universe of 200-300 large and mid-cap Australian stocks that would satisfy minimum liquidity and capitalisation requirements.
Hersh Gandhi, Man Group’s managing director Asia Pacific, said this new strategy would be launched with seed capital from Russell Investments, which would initially include the new Australia core strategy as part of the manager line up in three of their Australian equity funds.
“We’ve had a number of discussions with Australian investors about applying Man Numeric’s core approach across Australian equities. The Australian market is quite concentrated, so we see significant opportunities outside the large cap stocks that can be unlocked through a quantitative, bottom up strategy like this,” he said.
Man Numeric was founded in 1989 and since 2014 it has been a part of Man Group.
Since joining Man Group, the business grew from $14.7 billion in assets under management (AUM) to $31.9 billion as of 31 December, 2017, the firm said.
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