Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards 2015 – multi asset (diversified)

Winner: UBS Global Asset Management

Zenith says: Zenith highly regards UBS Global Asset Management’s globally resourced team, scalable investment process and established risk-management capability. UBS has an extended track record in the management of a range of multi-asset strategies, including traditional diversified, low-cost and dynamic asset allocation. This provides us with sufficient comfort with regard to its capability across this asset class and ability to navigate a range of testing market environments. Zenith believes UBS has particular strength in the derivation of active strategies spanning asset allocation, manager selection and currency.
– Andrew Yap, head of multi asset and income research

Zenith sector review: Zenith continues to see strong flows across this market segment, with investor interest particularly evident across a range of low-cost, income-centric and specialist strategies. The sector continues to cater to the needs of a diverse range of investors with competing risk/return preferences. Zenith believes investor appetite for active asset allocation expertise is likely to remain at elevated levels, particularly amidst a period of increased market complexity and uncertainty. Zenith is, however, wary that in an environment of compressed return expectations, it may become increasingly difficult for sector participants to replicate the lofty returns of past years, placing greater emphasis on bottom-up strategies to support portfolio outcomes.

Tom Griffiths, director, portfolio manager, UBS Global Asset Management (pictured): The way the global economy is at the moment, we expect our relative value trades will be key to how we perform over the next year. Rather than taking larger risk-weights in directional positions within the market, we are really looking for those relative value trades to be both long and short in markets, to allow us to hit our performance targets during that period. It comes down to process, at the end of the day. There’s a team and a strong process and we have two meetings a week to debate [ideas] very vigorously. It comes down to our strong process, and really from that come the trade ideas. We have an offsite once a year where everyone meets, but it’s a great team effort. Part of that is the way we collaborate in these meetings and the way the process brings everything together. We hunt as a team. Individuals come up with ideas, but they are debated by the team, and everyone has got skin in the game. The process is designed to ensure that it’s in everyone’s interests to find the best ideas and the best trades to go into the portfolios.

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