Smarter Money Investments is pleased to announce that its rapidly growing active cash product, the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund, has received two new ratings from leading research groups, Mercer Investment Consulting and Australia Ratings.
Australia Ratings, a new credit rating agency founded by former Standard & Poor’s Managing Director Chris Dalton, has awarded the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund a strong “A” rating. Mr Dalton says this means the fund has a “has a high degree of creditworthiness” and “low degree of risk”. Australia Ratings also awarded the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund a “blue” complexity indicator, which means the fund “represents a relatively simple financial investment”.
Key strengths nominated by Mr Dalton include that the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund is run by “experienced fixed income portfolio managers with a focus on active cash and bond management”, the “high proportion of the fund’s assets held in cash, term deposits and liquid securities”, and its “low volatility risk due to the short interest rate duration of portfolio”.
The global asset consulting firm Mercer has also recently awarded the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund a rating, although specific details of the rating are Mercer intellectual property and only available to its clients.
Matt Lawler, Yellow Brick Road CEO, said “the new Australia Ratings and Mercer ratings add to Atchison’s “Highly Recommended” investment-grade assessment of the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund, which we are finding is increasingly popular amongst wholesale and institutional clients”.
“In the September quarter we will distribute a 4.2 per cent annualised income return after all fees to our investors, which is consistent with our net 4 per cent return after all fees over the last 12 months that compares favourably to the RBA’s 2.5 per cent cash rate.”
Darren Harvey, one of the Smarter Money Active Cash Fund’s portfolio managers, added “retail investors in ASX hybrids have suffered substantial losses of up to 3 per cent or more in recent months notwithstanding repeated warnings about the risks associated with these investments”.
“This hammers home the need for bona fide cash and fixed-income investments with commensurately modest risk. And we are big believers in the role that actively managed floating- rate and cash-like solutions can play in an environment in which interest rates are eventually normalised and traditional fixed-rate bonds wear capital losses”.
“In just the month of September the UBS Composite Bond Index was down 0.33%, which could be a portent for the future.”
