Paradice Investments’ $800 million mid-cap fund will celebrate its second birthday by opening for further investment, while its small-caps team is looking to add an analyst.
Each September anniversary, Paradice’s mid-cap fund reopens for further investment. Portfolio managers John Lake and Matthew Riordan have yet to determine the size of this year’s capital raising, based on client demand and the overall market. Lake said it was possible that the fund would be open to new investors, however he added that the managers were cognisant of the need to first support and accomodate clients that had supported the fund from day one. He said the fund was anticipating a reasonable response, despite clients’ recent reluctance to invest in equities. Lake said that the mid-cap fund had performed well relative to the equity market turmoil, returning -2.3 per cent against the benchmark’s -9.91 per cent in the rolling year until the end of April. Meanwhile, the $1.5 billion small-cap team, headed up by David Paradice and Adam Harvey, is looking for an analyst to sit across the small-cap and micro-investment funds. It is yet to replace small-cap analyst Sam le Cornu, who departed Paradice in early March.
Future Fund chief investment officer Ben Samild said that FY24 has been a great year for alpha creation, thanks to strong returns in equities and, unusually, across multiple hedge fund strategies all at the same time. He reflected the past few years have been “a difficult time to be an asset owner and to generate positive returns for risk assets” but the Future Fund is tracking well of its long-term mandate.
Simon Hoyle and Darcy SongSeptember 4, 2024
