Articles

We are content that the majority of our fund investments have outperformed their benchmarks in the first half of the year, a pleasing continuation from 2019. But aside from the actual relative performance delivered from our investments, the past four months have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to press home our fund research competitive advantage.

Our fund research process is based on leveraging our competitive advantage: our size. Our assets under management and our six-strong fund research team gives us the access and the resources to ‘out-analyse’ the competition. We know that past performance is a very poor way to pick future winners, as are many other popular means such as manager name recognition, fund size, fund flows or marketing campaigns. Rather, by knowing more about funds than other investors, organised in an intuitive, coherent way, we have the best chance of picking the future winners.

Since the market peak back in February, the fund research team has spent over 150 hours speaking with our fund managers and a further 50 hours talking with Chairs of boards of investment companies in which we invest. Quizzing them on how they have dealt with the extraordinary events of the past four months has given us a unique opportunity to further our information advantage and ‘out-analyse’ even more the fund investments we invest in on behalf of our clients.

In this commentary Andrew Summers, Investec’s Head of Collectives & Fund Research, reflects on fund manager responses to Covid-19, lessons learnt from the past four months and how our research team will continue to support our clients in the future.  

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