Finance firm Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management is hailing the success of a fund it launched 15 years ago.
The company claims its ‘Select Global Opportunity’ strategy marks a decade and a half of outperforming other funds in its peer group, averaging a return of 8.2 per cent since its inception – compared to three per cent for its peers.
Assets under management (AUM) currently is standing at 280million US dollars (as at March 31).
Mark Piper, the fund manager who has headed up the Select Global Opportunity Fund since the start said: ‘The Fund is attractive to both regular savers and lump-sum investors with investment horizons of three to five years, as it is often exposed to short term volatility.
‘The Fund is opportunistic and can move quickly between strategies, shifting weightings quickly – what could be a 20 per cent Asian weighting one day can become a 20 per cent US weighting the next.
‘Our strategy is to use our insight, backed up with thorough research, with a good dose of gut feeling.
‘While there is a robust investment process in place for fund selection and input from the asset allocation committee, we are not tied to any benchmark.
‘We believe this approach combined with dynamic and focused asset allocation has created the Fund’s attractive long-term record. We are looking forward to continuing to produce strong performance going into the future!’
Launched originally in 2001 as the FPI Collins Stewart Aggressive Fund with Friends Provident International (FPI), the Fund started life at the same time as the dotcom bubble burst and the Enron and Worldcom scandals broke.
Its initial performance was a sign of things to come as it kept its value in US dollar terms from launch until the end of 2002, buoyed by a weighting in Asian and Eastern European equities.
Having weathered the tech crash and accounting storm, the strategy moved from a defensive stance to take advantage of the five-year bull market that followed, returning over 125 per cent. Despite its auspicious start in troubling times, for the first six years of its existence, it remained a bit of a hidden gem.
All this changed in 2008, when the launch of the Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management Select range opened the Fund to all its clients and re-branded the Fund to reflect its potential.
The re-launch coincided with the global financial crisis, but as global equities plummeted, the manager raised cash to more than 40 per cent to mitigate the worst of the falls; by the end of November 2008 the Fund was down 27.4 per cent compared to a 43 per cent loss for the FTSE World TRI USD Index.
The Fund’s strategy as the crisis neared its end was to embrace risk, focusing on thematic plays in unloved sectors of the market. This enabled the Fund to return over 33 per cent in 2009 and recoup its losses much faster than global equities. Since September 2008, the Select Global Opportunity Fund’s assets have grown at an annualised rate of 35.5 per cent.