Backed by strong decisions during February, APSEC’s Atlantic Pacific Australian equity fund has been the top-performing Australian equities fund in the first three quarters of the year.
According to FE Analytics, within the Australian Core Strategies universe, the Australian equities sector had lost 8.21%, since the start of the year to 30 September, 2020.
The APSEC Atlantic Pacific Australian Equity fund had returned 24.12%, followed by Perennial Private to Public Opportunities (22.73%), Hyperion Australian Growth Companies (15.48%), Bennelong Australian Equities (8.86%) and BT Wholesale Partner Australian Shares Growth 1 (7.54%).
The APSEC fund had a long-bias strategy and typically bought or short sells Australian listed securities and derivatives, and had performed well during March where it returned 17.19% in that month alone.
Nicolas Bryon, fund manager at APSEC Funds Management, had previously said this was due to taking off their market risk during February.
“In terms of what we did specifically during March, it started in late February, it had been something we had been thinking about for quite some time where we’d take all our market risk off over weekends,” Bryon said to Money Management in June.
The fund said in its latest report that it had witnessed over the past couple of months a re-pricing of the companies that were beaten-up during the first half of the year due to COVID-19 dynamics.
“The recent re-pricing has been quite large with a number of the fund’s holdings reverting positively,” it said.
“In the case of Ooh Media, it has repriced 75% from August lows to September close! This is against a backdrop of nothing materially changing other than company executives indicating nothing material has worsened.
“Boral is another company like this returning 31% over the same time period. It is companies like these that we believe will continue to re-price and further sizeable gains are more likely over coming years.”
Perennial Private to Public Opportunities was a closed-ended fund which launched last year in August that focused on unlisted, pre-initial public offering (IPO) companies.
Hyperion’s top holdings included home appliance maker Fisher & Paykel, 4WD accessory company ARB Corporation, cloud-based accounting software Xero, Wisetech and Dominos.
Bennelong’s top holdings were CSL, wall and floor product manufacturer James Hardie Industries, BHP Billiton, international education placements IDP Education, and kitchen appliance manufacturer Breville.
When it came to sector weighting, 40% of the fund was allocated specifically to consumer products.
Best-performing Australian equity funds for the first nine months of 2020
