Macquarie Investment Management takes out fixed interest (diversified) category

Macquarie Investment Management has taken out the Fixed Interest (Diversified) category of this year’s Money Management/Lonsec Fund Manager of the Year Awards.

Lonsec noted the Diversified Fixed Interest Fund’s multi-manager approach when selecting the winner, commending the specialist external managers appointed to manage the fund’s offshore sectors in global high yield, global investment grade credit and emerging market debt.

“Lonsec believes the adoption of a ‘best of breed’ approach in selecting external managers to manage more specialised asset classes is an attractive feature of the fund,” the researcher stated.

Brett Lewthwaite, head of fixed income Australia, put the fund’s win down to the active allocation to sectors within the fund.

“It’s managed to an Australian fixed income benchmark, but we have the ability to invest in global credit, high yield and emerging markets, and we also have the ability to seek unique opportunities and allocate to them,” he said.

That freedom to allocate compensates investors with a good reward to risk approach, Lewthwaite said.

The performance of the fund over the last 12 months has been “exceptionally good”, outperforming Australian bonds by approximately 1.5 per cent per year over eight years, Lewthwaite said.

“To have a track record over eight or nine years that’s 1.5 per cent per annum is a pretty good result,” he said.

The fund also returned 9.4 per cent after fees during the 2009 calendar year, a strong performance compared to the Lonsec peer group average, the researcher said.

The fund has a number of competitive advantages in people, processes and product design, and Macquarie is among the largest and most well resourced Australian fixed interest managers, Lonsec said.

Simon Doyle, head of fixed income and multi asset at finalist Schroders Investment Management, said the way the fund was constructed had given strength to its performance.

“The way the fund is constructed is to deliver a defensive strategy to clients, and I think that in the fixed income space there has been a lot of different strategies employed over the last few years, but we’ve always maintained the defensive integrity of our fund,” he said.

The primary goal was to deliver good returns, but using the defensive toolkit at their disposal, he said.

That means capturing a diversified array of risk premiums without pushing things too hard and jeopardising the defensive integrity of the strategy, Doyle said.

The second finalist, UBS Global Asset Management Diversified Fixed Income Fund, also encompasses high yield and emerging market debt to create country, regional and global strategies with a wide range of benchmarks.