Fund managers John Campbell and Jeremy Bendeich have formed Avoca Investment Management, but said it wasn’t an easy decision to leave their former employer UBS.
The two small-cap fund managers who quit UBS Global Asset Management (UBSGAM) last month have partnered with Bennelong to establish their new boutique.
Avoca will be mostly owned by managing director John Campbell and chief investment officer Jeremy Bendeich. They both formerly helped manage the UBS Australian Small Companies Fund.
Additionally, the boutique will employ senior investment analyst Michael Vidler, who worked Campbell and Bendeich while at UBS and helped provide analysis and reporting for the fund.
“The decision to leave UBS was not an easy one,” Campbell told Investor Weekly.
“UBS was a pretty good organisation but at the end of the day all of us had a desire to run our own business and to be able to structure it such that we could confidently go to clients and potential clients and say that the guys managing your money today will be the same in five and ten years time as opposed to a large institution which does not have the retention structure that we have achieved today.”
Bendeich said the boutique planned to target financial planners and institutional investors and its first product, the Bennelong Avoca Emerging Leaders Fund, would invest in small and mid cap Australian equities.
He said the fund, expected to be launched on 1 July, will have similar guidelines around portfolio construction to the UBS offering.
“We will have a competitive base fee and a performance fee,” he said.
“We want to make sure this capability is successful and delivered value for clients before we consider another product.”
He said Bennelong was chosen as the partner because it had the right values, a good cultural fit and provided strong support.
Campbell and Bendeich expressed their intention to leave UBSGAM in April, prompting research house Standard & Poor’s to put the UBS Australian Small Companies Fund on hold, while Lonsec put the product on fund watch.
A UBSGAM spokesperson said the fund’s third portfolio manager, Stephen Wood, did not plan to leave, and the company announced on 28 April the appointment of Victor Gomes as portfolio manager for the product.
UBSGAM would look to add a further member to the small caps team, the spokesperson said.
Gomes was most recently portfolio manager at Selector Funds Management and before that co-founder of Hayberry Investments.
