Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards 2015 – Australian equities (large cap)
Winner: Bennelong Australian Equity Partners
Zenith says: Despite the retirement of Paul Cuddy, Bennelong Australian Equity Partners (BAEP) has continued to produce strong results. Mark East remains BAEP’s key investment professional and in Zenith’s opinion, he has been instrumental in the success of BAEP. Through a logical and robust investment process, which aims to identify quality companies that exhibit mispriced earnings growth, BAEP has consistently produced strong outperformance of the benchmark over multiple periods of assessment.
– Quan Nguyen, senior investment analyst
Zenith sector review: The Australian equities – large cap universe continues to be one of Zenith’s largest categories. As such, the sector is highly competitive, comprising an array of different strategies. With the domestic equity market experiencing a period of elevated volatility, Zenith believes it is highly important to employ an active manager to navigate through this period. In the past, Zenith’s active managers have shown a strong propensity to outperform in these periods of uncertainty.
Mark East, founder and chief investment officer, Bennelong Australian Equity Partners (pictured): We’ve stuck to our process of investing in what we see as high-quality companies. We’ve got a strong focus on earnings and earnings revisions, and trying to identify companies that have positive earnings revisions. We’ve been at Bennelong for nearly eight years, and it’s the same process we run at Bennelong as at previous employers, probably for the past 15 or 20 years. Most of us worked at ING before we set up at Bennelong; and one of the analysts I’ve worked with for nearly 20 years, at three or four places. We can stand some turnover, but all the people we’ve worked with for a while, and the new people who come in, quickly learn what is expected of them, and I guess how we look at stocks. People come in and they’ve got new ways of looking at things and that’s fine as well, that’s healthy; but the basic premise of investing in high-quality companies that surprise on earnings, that doesn’t really change. High-quality companies means strong management teams, good return on equity, strong balance sheet – those things do not waiver.
