Ashburton, the active investment manager, has been awarded Standard & Poor’s A rating for its Ashburton Global Funds PCC Americas Equity Fund managed by Nick Skiming (pictured right).
Stephen Kearns, Product Development Director at Ashburton, comments: “This is great news and testament to Nick’s investment expertise and skill. It also reflects the distinctive and successful active management process applied to the Fund. Nick has 20 years of investment experience behind him, five of which have been at Ashburton since he took over management of the Fund in 2002. This knowledge has clearly been channelled to produce such encouraging results: over three and five years the Fund has returned 57.54% and 101.89%, compared to the MSCI North America Index returns of 25.77% and 75.73%, respectively.”*
Commenting on the recent rating, a spokesperson for Standard & Poor’s said: “Returns have been solid year-to-date, with the Fund benefiting from its underweight financials and consumer discretionary, and shift up the market-cap scale. Some of Skiming’s themes added to performance, with stocks such as Flowserve and Foster Wheeler related to infrastructure and Monsanto and Potash related to agriculture, all providing strong returns.”
US EQUITIES OUTLOOK
Nick Skiming said: "Whilst the woes in the US housing market and the subsequent losses by large financial houses may continue to make investors tremble for the next several months, we believe that the grimmest headlines are largely behind us. We believe that concerted Central Bank efforts to ease the credit crisis and a visible about turn in the Fed's interest rate policy will turn the tide for the US markets, and with valuations cheap by recent historic standards, there is scope for good progress in 2008."
Nick Skiming heads up the team with support provided by Jonathan Aldrich-Blake, assistant investment manager. Nick is an active fund manager who aims to achieve long-term capital growth by investing in a diversified portfolio of equity or equity related securities, principally in the US, but also with the freedom to invest up to 30% outside the US, in mainly Canadian and Latin American regions.
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