Select Asset Management may terminate its Aspect Futures Fund after the product’s underlying investment manager, Aspect Capital, formed a new alliance with Colonial First State (CFS).
United Kingdom-based Aspect and CFS yesterday announced a deal whereby CFS would be able to exclusively market a range of funds managed by Aspect to retail investors in Australia and New Zealand.
Select’s head of portfolio management Robert Graham-Smith said it was possible that the Aspect Futures Fund may be wound up, partly due to the Aspect/CFS deal but also because Select shifted focus in 2009 towards distributing its own multi-manager portfolios.
“We have a great relationship with Aspect and the deal they’ve done with CFS is consistent with our intention to refocus our business on our core multi-manager offerings rather than represent single investment managers in Australia,” he said.
“We continue to rate Aspect highly and I would emphasise that Aspect would continue to be one of the fund managers within our multi-manager portfolios including Select Growth, Select Defensive and Select Alternatives.”
The Aspect Futures Fund added 12.4 per cent per annum from its inception in March 2007 through to November 2009.
The Baker Steel Gold Fund, also distributed by Select, would continue to be offered on the Australian market, Graham-Smith said.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned CFS plans to launch an Aspect fund on its FirstChoice platform and on FirstWrap in the first quarter.
“In addition, we will look to extend this fund across other retail channels and explore opportunities to roll out further structured products using Aspect’s alpha-generating capacity throughout the year,” CFS chief executive Brian Bissaker said.
Aspect is a research-driven investment manager which applies a systematic approach to capture price trends in both rising and falling markets.
The fund manager’s futures trading programme seeks to generate consistent positive returns in over 100 international futures markets across a broad range of sectors including cash, bonds, equities, currencies and commodities.
