Investors Mutual does it again with Australian equities

Investors Mutualhas taken out the Australian equities category of theMoneyManagement/AssirtFund Manager of the Year Award for the second year running.

A relative new player in the game, Investors Mutual is celebrating its five-year anniversary this year with a win over finalistsUBS Global Asset ManagementandBarclays Global Investors.

Head of research at Assirt Caroline Saunders attributes the group’s success to a healthy blend of good stock selection, conservatism in a troubled market and a sound investment team.

“Investors Mutual won mainly because of their stock selection skills, and (investment director) Anton Tagliaferro is very good at stock picking. But he has also built a good team that he’s trained very well,” Saunders says.

Tagliaferro agrees the group’s success is the result of a team effort.

The Investors Mutual team has been relatively stable since it came together five years ago, while reaping the benefits of a fresh start.

“When you start a new team, you start with a blank piece of paper. Then you get people to look at the stocks in your own style. We didn’t inherit any baggage from anywhere else,” Tagliaferro says.

But Saunders notes that it’s also the processes, not just the people employed by Investors Mutual, that work for it.

“I’ve been in the industry for 15 years, so when I started this up five years ago I put in place processes I had found worked for me in various places in the past,” Tagliaferro says.

Saunders says that the group’s small cap value bias has also helped in the last year, when value managers have been doing well.

While it has been another tough year for the share market, Tagliaferro says his group is not wedded to the index.

“We do a lot of our own valuation work, and try and restrict our companies to those we deem to be investment grade. We look for companies where there is a good recurring earnings base,” Tagliaferro says.

“Over the last year we’ve run the portfolio very conservatively, we were careful not to overpay for these stocks,” he says.

In regards to Barclays Global Investors, Saunders says a “disciplined, quantitative and true style neutral approach” was the key to the group’s success.

Barclays director, adviser services Michael Ohlsson says “we’ve had the ability to consistently add three per cent above benchmark in a low absolute return environment, which has really increased the demand for our products from both platforms and planners”.