Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards 2015 – Australian equities (small cap)
Winner: NovaPort Capital
Zenith says: Zenith’s conviction in the NovaPort fund is predicated on our high regard for the portfolio management capabilities of both Alex Milton and Sinclair Currie. Through the consistent application of an intuitive research approach, NovaPort has produced strong absolute and relative performance over all notable timeframes. Impressively, NovaPort has achieved this with lower risk than the benchmark and peers.
– Quan Nguyen, senior investment analyst
Zenith sector review: For the first time in recent memory, the smaller capitalisation segment of the Australian equity market displayed a high level of performance dispersion between active fund managers. That is, over the past 12 months, we have seen some active managers underperform their respective benchmarks, whereas others have generated strong outperformance. Zenith believes that this is due to the changing composition of the benchmark, with the removal of some low-quality, resources-related companies and the addition of higher-quality initial public offerings (IPOs). This has increased the importance of stock selection within the segment.
Sinclair Currie, portfolio manager, NovaPort Capital (pictured): It’s going to be an interesting year ahead. Probably the thing people are most interested in is whether or not the impact of sustained central bank easy money is really going to flow through into increased consumer confidence, because to date it’s been a little bit lacklustre. While we’ve seen some recovery, it hasn’t been overtly strong, so [it] will be interesting to see whether there is a meaningful and obvious pickup in that business activity. Unexpected events are just a fact of life; you can’t escape from that. There are a couple of ways which you can deal with them better. I guess the first way is you’ve got a portfolio of companies where you can diversify your risk, both to individual stocks or to industry or systematic risks. We focus on looking for quality companies to invest in, because our belief is that [if] a business has foundations of quality in it, it’s got a better chance of picking itself up or bouncing back from any hits related to external shocks.