The number of global equity teams trading from Australia has risen to nine, in part driven by the growing pool of assets in superannuation.
The most recent addition are two funds from Antipodes Partners run by Jacob Mitchell, former deputy chief investment officer of Platinum Asset Management and a portfolio manager of the Platinum International Fund.
Other recent entrants include a global equities team at AustralianSuper and the launch of Perpetual’s Global Share Fund in August, 2014, while more established funds are offered by Cooper Investors, Hunter Hall, Magellan, Morphic, Platinum and Wingate.
Antipodes Partners’ new funds offer a global equity long and a global equity long/ short strategy with the option of active currency management – both are being targeted at institutional investors.
Their launch has long been an ambition of Mitchell, who started out in fund management as an Australian equity analyst 20 years ago due to the lack of domestic opportunities in global equities in Australia at that time.
He believes global equities managed from Sydney or Melbourne have an advantage over those managed in the Northern Hemisphere.
“In terms of face-to-face contact with management, it has served myself as an investor to have some distance, not being caught up in the noise of that market. There is some benefit from having that clear head space,” said Mitchell.
The success of Platinum and Magellan is deepening the pool of local talent and to meet demand for the large and growing pool of domestic capital looking to allocate money offshore, he saw it as inevitable the number of domestic based global equity managers would “accelerate”.
Mitchell’s process is concentrated and value driven. Favoured themes include Chinese companies with the potential for franchise opportunities worldwide, other emerging market stocks and large cap tech stocks. For the future he sees potential in service companies in the oil sector such as Schlumberger and Halliburton, which he believes have pricing power, but are under-valued. His team of seven is also running an Asian equities fund.
Anthony Serhan, managing director, research strategy Asia/Pacific at Morningstar, saw the logic in the emergence of such locally-based value-driven global equity managers. “We have some skilled investment professionals who can bring a different perspective to global investing,” he said. “As with any manager, there needs to be a fit between the process and their resources, including location. So, I think it would be hard to run an index aware, bottom up, intensive research process from Australia.”
Antipodes Partners has partnered with Pinnacle to help in the distribution of its funds.
