Rising to the top of the heap does not happen overnight. Rather, it is about laying the foundation over many decades, adhering to investment strategies and products, being innovative and staying relevant.
Doing this for 45 years has seen 2014 finalist Legg Mason Asset Management Australia emerge as Money Management/Lonsec’s Fund Manager of the Year.
With $30 billion in funds under management, it has indeed been about representing wholly-owned subsidiary companies of its investment management affiliates in the Australian marketplace, according to Legg Mason head of Australia, Annalisa Clark.
The firm’s global tool shed of affiliates enables it to look at clients’ specific needs, examine what the affiliates can offer, and bring that to market in Australia to develop it.
Head of sales, Beau Titchkosky, also attributes the win to ramping up resources in its retail/wholesale business, and generating income solutions in the post-retirement space.
The firm saw a clear shift to global unconstrained benchmark agnostic type bond investing in an asset class like global bonds and adapted to that.
“We’ve adopted where we’ve needed to, we’ve listened to our clients, and we’ve provided them with solutions,” Titchkosky said.
“Legg Mason’s a pure play asset manager; we don’t own distribution, we’re not vertically integrated in any way, so if we’re in a client portfolio, it is for the very purest reason of all, and that is, we want to be the investor’s partner of choice,” Titchkosky said.
Legg Mason inched ahead of BT Investment Management and UBS Global Asset Management (Australia), two other finalists in the category.
BT Investment Management chief executive, Emilio Gonzalez, said the firm is a core manager that looks for opportunities irrespective of style, and bottom-up fundamental research, and takes calculated risks.
“It’s all about not taking a lot of big bets, but taking a number of small ones that you believe will play out over time,” Gonzalez said.
“Over the last 12 months, in a number of our areas, a lot of the thesis and themes that we thought would play out in the market has played out the way we thought it would. And that’s resulted in the performance that we’ve had particularly in the calendar 2014.”
UBS attributed its success to its tactical beta series, which began three years ago, and has a 100-strong team with over 30 years’ experience in diversified asset allocation.
“Those funds have been pretty successful in gaining utilisation by advisers who are looking for low cost investments in the clients’ portfolios but with the benefit of having active asset allocation over the top,” head of UBS asset management Australia, Bryce Doherty, said.
