Bennelong/Avoca fund gets thumbs up from Zenith
The Bennelong Avoca Emerging Leaders Fund, run by former UBS portfolio managers John Campbell and Jeremy Bendeich, has been awarded a 'recommended' rating by Zenith Investment Partners.
Campbell and Bendeich left the UBS small caps team in March this year to launch Avoca Investment Management in partnership with Bennelong Funds Management.
Zenith investment analyst Nicholas Busst said the joint venture between Avoca and Bennelong was "extremely robust", allowing the portfolio managers to "focus purely on [their] investment duties".
Campell's 20 years of experience, coupled with Bendeich's desire to specialise in small caps, had contributed to the Emerging Leaders fund comfortably outperforming the benchmark, Busst said.
Campbell, who is also Avoca's managing director, said he found Zenith's endorsement "gratifying".
"Zenith were quite good supporters of ours at UBS, so they were pretty quick to do a review on us here," he said.
Campbell said the recent volatility in the stock market had made him revise his opinion that parts of the resources market were expensive.
"The resources market from January this year has had a reasonable pullback, and there are pockets there that we think okay … the coal stocks in particular, we quite like," Campbell said.
He added that the Emerging Leaders fund would have a maximum capacity of $800-850 million.
"We'll be sticking to that quite religiously. In small caps, if you get too much under management you get essentially locked into positions that you can't do anything about," Campbell said.
Zenith was happy to award the fund a 'recommended' rating - despite its relatively short existence - since its managers were "amongst the more experienced in the Australian small capitalisation universe," Busst added.
"While Avoca was only launched in May, Jeremy and I have a strong history of working together. This, coupled with our co-ownership of the business, provides us with the impetus to continually strive for long-term outperformance for our clients," Campbell said.
Campbell and Bendeich are well complemented by the fund's senior investment analyst Michael Vidler, Busst added.
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