The winners of the 2016 Professional Planner|Zenith Fund Awards will be announced tomorrow at an event at Ivy Ballroom in Sydney. The awards cover 19 separate categories, including the coveted Distributor of the Year and overall Fund Manager of the Year.
The managing partner of Zenith, David Wright, says the awards represent recognition of excellence in the application of a fund manager’s investment philosophy and process in the management of their respective capability. Nominees have been announced in 18 of the 19 categories, with nominees for Fund Manager of the Year to be revealed on the day.
Zenith follows a highly regarded and comprehensive process for selecting the nominees and determining the winners of each fund category. To be nominated for an award, a manager must excel on nine criteria that encompass all aspects of a fund manager’s operations:
1. Organisational strength
A fund manager’s business must be stable, with strong and experienced management and an organisational structure that allows the investment professionals to concentrate on investment management responsibilities without other business distractions.
2. Investment philosophy
The investment philosophy must be clear and well articulated, with the manager able to readily identify their competitive advantage and how they generate alpha.
3. Investment process
The investment process must be consistent with the manager’s investment philosophy and be consistently applied, true to label throughout all investment market conditions.
4. Investment team
The capability must be managed by a highly experienced investment team that is well resourced to effectively manage the investment strategy. The team must also have a strong track record of returns that outperform their respective performance benchmark over longer periods of time.
5. Security selection
The manager’s universe of securities must be clearly defined, along with the security identification process used to highlight which securities the manager will focus research time and resources conducting further research on.
6. Security valuation
Zenith favours managers that use a consistent security valuation approach and metrics that facilitate comparability on valuation between different securities.
7. Portfolio construction
Zenith believes it is essential that the portfolio construction process leverages off the security selection and valuation process and that the securities and their weightings are transparent and a direct function of the securities’ value and risk management constraints of the portfolio.
8. Risk management
Zenith believes risk management should be a core component of the manager’s investment process. As such, risk management constraints should be logical and consistent with the manager’s investment process and ensure the capability is managed in a “true to label” manner such that “what you see is what you get” from an investor’s perspective.
9. Performance
Ultimately, performance and the investment experience of investors are critical to the assessment of a manager’s capability. From this perspective, managers have been nominated for their superior longer-term returns, but with recognition of their more recent returns as well, given the annual frequency of the fund awards. Zenith seeks managers that ideally produce an attractive absolute return, outperform their respective benchmarks and do so in a risk-controlled, low-volatility, highly consistent manner.
And the nominees are …
