After a remarkable show of support from institutional investors, Paradice Investments’ broad markets fund has closed to new applications after raising $1 billion since opening in May.

Mandates of $100 million from REST and $51 million from AustSafe Super are among the latest of ten received by the Troy Angus-managed fund, many of them advised by long-time Paradice supporters JANA and Frontier Investment Consulting. After nearly a decade at BT, whose Imputation Fund he took to the top of the performance surveys, Angus was aware his new clients at Paradice were viewing their investments as alpha plays. “;It’s not an absolute return fund, but they want outperformance from us, that’s for sure,”; Angus said. Despite the rapid inflows and volatile markets of July and August, Angus and his offsider Adam Palmer have not acted gradually in getting the broad market fund set. “;We get the money and whack it straight into the market, it’s what we’re being paid to do and the volatility actually created opportunities for us,”; Angus said, adding it was too early to release meaningful performance numbers for the fund. Run in Angus’ familiar concentrated bottom-up style, the fund currently has an 80 per cent allocation to the ASX Top 50, the mega-caps which have the led the market’s gains this year. Paradice’s AustSafe mandate was funded through the redemption of a Perennial Value Australian equities mandate, while REST’s allocation was sourced from cashflow. Paradice is only the latest manager to be appointed over a busy past quarter at the $14.6 billion REST fund. In August, REST terminated its global equities mandate with Bank of Ireland Asset Management, distributing the proceeds among existing managers Pzena, Baillee Gifford, and MFS with top-ups of $100 million, $100 million and $133 million respectively. Pzena was first appointed in June, along with T-Rowe Price, when a mandate with Marathon Asset Management was terminated.