Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards 2015 – Fund Manager of the Year
Winner: Magellan Asset Management
Zenith says: Magellan Asset Management was an award nominee in three categories: global equities, ETFs and infrastructure, where it was the award winner. Magellan continues to be an investor’s favourite for global equities, where it continues to produce strong performance. Magellan has also been at the forefront of product innovation with the launch of its actively-managed, listed investment vehicle, nominated in the ETF category. Zenith notes Magellan’s outstanding investment capabilities, depth of resources and high-calibre, highly experienced investment teams across multiple asset classes. As such, we believe Magellan is a deserved winner of this year’s Fund Manager of the Year award.
Frank Casarotti, general manager of distribution, Magellan Asset Management (pictured): This is truly incredible for someone like Magellan, who I would argue is still the new kid on the block in funds management. The business is a lousy eight or nine years old. You think of groups like AMP or Perpetual [that] have probably over a hundred-year history of managing other people’s money, and here’s Magellan.
Thank you to Zenith; thank you to Conexus and Professional Planner in particular. This is a massive team effort at Magellan, and the good news is our primary objective was always to deliver on results. The distribution piece is kind of nice and we have some fantastic people in my team, but the real nucleus and the real hub of the business I would still argue are the investment professionals, the analysts, and the investment team headed by Gerald [Stack]. Obviously Hamish [Douglass] takes a lot of the credit; he is the frontman and we take nothing away from that, but it is very much an across-the-business outcome that kind of lands us where we are today, with what we think is an incredibly long runway for growth from here.
The other call-out that I’d like to make is what we call business support: legal, compliance, risk management, operations – they are all a big part of our business and it’s very much integrated. I hope it never changes with growth. But this award is, for us, just out of this world.
[There is] a greater acceptance and propensity to use global equities as part of a mainstream portfolio. Whereas you think back three, five, seven years, we were still positioning ourselves for growth, but the track record had not been built; people were still nervous post-GFC, and so on.
Another thing we’ve done is opened up the stockbroker market with the quoted vehicle. MGE [Magellan Global Equities Fund] now has raised $250 million since March and a lot of that is through stockbrokers, who at the end of the day we have not been able to do business with.
All of a sudden they are coming to the roadshows. They are wanting to understand what we’re doing within the strategy.
There’s a buzz [around Magellan] because we’ve also opened up some of the banking channels. All of the success to date has been predominantly independent or semi-independent [advisers]; now, all of a sudden we’ve opened up Westpac. We’ve opened up ANZ, to some extent. We’re getting closer to NAB. Those people are for the first time starting to be exposed to us. It’s the banking channels that’s helping us gain some further attention.
[Advisers] can relay to their clients some of the themes within our portfolio. They certainly know what’s in it. And they’re kind of advocates now, because they can see some of it is coming true, [such as] the cashless society: they find themselves using their phones and tap-and-go and payWave and whatever else; and that’s positioned within our portfolio, the global payments companies. And it’s happening.
And the tech sector is exactly the same: the Microsofts and the Oracles and the eBays and the PayPals of the world are truly global businesses and we hope like hell we continue to deliver on those kinds of results.