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Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management’s Guernsey-managed Select Global Opportunity strategy celebrates 15 years this month, marking a decade and a half of outperforming other funds in its peer group, averaging a return of 8.2% since its inception – compared to 3.0% for its peers - and with AUM currently at USD280million (as at 31 March 2016).
Launched in 2001 as the FPI Collins Stewart Aggressive Fund with Friends Provident International (FPI), the Fund started life at the same time as the dotcom bubble burst and the Enron and Worldcom scandals broke. Its initial performance was a sign of things to come as it kept its value in US dollar terms from launch until the end of 2002, buoyed by a weighting in Asian and Eastern European equities. At the same time, other investments in its peer group fell by an average of 12.9% and global equities, as measured by the FTSE World TRI USD Index, fell 27.5%.
Having weathered the tech crash and accounting storm, the strategy moved from a defensive stance to take advantage of the five-year bull market that followed, returning over 125%. Despite its auspicious start in troubling times, for the first six years of its existence, it remained a bit of a hidden gem.
All this changed in 2008, when the launch of the Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management Select range opened the Fund to all its clients and re-branded the Fund to reflect its potential. The re-launch coincided with the global financial crisis, but as global equities plummeted, the manager raised cash to over 40% to mitigate the worst of the falls; by the end of November 2008 the Fund was down 27.4% compared to a 43% loss for the FTSE World TRI USD Index. The Fund’s strategy as the crisis neared its end was to embrace risk, focusing on thematic plays in unloved sectors of the market. This enabled the Fund to return over 33% in 2009 and recoup its losses much faster than global equities. Since September 2008, the Select Global Opportunity Fund’s assets have grown at an annualised rate of 35.5%.
Mark Piper, the fund manager who has headed up the Select Global Opportunity Fund since the start said: “The Fund is attractive to both regular savers andlump-sum investors with investment horizons of three to five years, as it is often exposed to short term volatility. The Fund is opportunistic and can move quickly between strategies, shifting weightings quickly – what could be a 20% Asian weighting one day can become a 20% US weighting the next. Our strategy is to use our insight, backed up with thorough research, with a good dose of gut feeling.
"Whilst there is a robust investment process in place for fund selection and input from the asset allocation committee, we are not tied to any benchmark. We believe this approach combined with dynamic and focused asset allocation has created the Fund’s attractive long-term record. We are looking forward to continuing to produce strong performance going into the future!”
