Boutique fund manager Titanium Asset Management (TAM) is poised to sign a deal to boost distribution of its ASX 200 All-Weather Fund after it soared 101.65 per cent in the 2008/09 financial year.
“We’re about to sign a fairly major deal within the next couple of weeks that will see our fund distributed more widely via a platform,” TAM director and chief investment officer Peter Rice said.
“Most of the money that’s in the fund so far as has come from clients of financial planners from the Titanium Financial Services side and direct investors.
“We’re hoping to eventually gain inflows from dealer groups and self-managed superannuation funds in the medium term.”
The TAM ASX 200 All-Weather Fund, launched in October 2007, has also drawn the interest of several asset consultants but has not been rated by any research houses yet, Rice said.
“A lot of the researchers are reluctant to do anything with it until we hit that magic three-year number in terms of a track record,” he said.
The fund is a market neutral strategy and it uses the S&P/ASX 200 Index as its investable universe of stocks and has separate long/short portfolios.
The product’s stock valuation and selection process has been developed over 20 years and is the subject of a doctoral thesis of an Australian university.
The key feature of the fund is the fact that market risk is effectively removed from the performance and that it has the potential to make returns in any market conditions, Rice said.
The fund’s value more than doubled in value in the year to 30 June 2009 and surged 40.2 per cent in October when the S&P/ASX 200 tumbled below 4000 points, amid the turmoil caused by the failure of US investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings the month before.
It shorted iron ore producer Mount Gibson Iron, nickel sulphide explorer and producer Western Areas and professional services company WorleyParsons for a 78.1 per cent, 62.7 per cent and 54.2 per cent profit, respectively.
