Coronation Fund Managers was founded in 1993 by a team of like-minded investment professionals, with a view to create investment excellence in the managing of money. Fourteen years later, with R120bn of assets under management, the business remains committed to this objective.
Coronation Fund Managers has a relatively small staff complement of 150 people and the company is all about achieving investment excellence for their clients. "We do not engage in any proprietary investment activities, making it easier to minimise conflicts of interest between ourselves and our clients," says Pieter Koekemoer, of Coronation. "We also outsource all non-core activities, such as distribution, administration and management of information technology infrastructure, to keep the business focused."
Access for financial advisers
Coronation's Personal Investment business, with R25bn of unit trust assets under management, is positioned to provide investment solutions to financial advisers through direct investments or across a wide variety of investment administration platforms offered by the linked product and life industries. "We are not prescriptive or do not seek to incentivise any specific way of doing business with Coronation; we are rather committed to ensure that our funds are available through a variety of different investment structures with the ability to meet different needs."
Recognition
Coronation's track record of strong consistent investment performance is reflected in its numerous local and international investment performance accolades:
* Top 2 in the Raging Bull Unit Trust Company of the Year every year since 2001
* 15 awards in the S&P's Investment Fund Awards for 2005 and 2006
* 25 consecutive quarters as No 1 or 2 on the Plexus Survey to end December 2006
* Over 30 Raging Bull individual fund awards and certificates since 2000
Only the best
This investment success is built on recruiting the best people in the industry, the application of a consistent investment philosophy, the courage to take long-term positions and the capacity to produce high quality proprietary investment research.
New products
Coronation recently introduced the Balanced Defensive and Dynamic Protetcor Funds. Balanced Defensive is a portfolio aimed at investors with a low risk tolerance requiring a stable income level in real terms. The fund aims to produce a minimum return of 3% above that of the money market, and is managed to not lose capital over any 12 month period. Coronation will forego all management fees if they do not achieve this objective.
The Dynamic Protector Fund is a specialised fund that provides the opportunity to invest in Coronation's equity houseview portfolio with a derivate-based risk management overlay to protect investors against significant equity market declines.
Challenges and successes
"The most significant challenge we face is to ensure that we consistently add value to all our clients, by creating value through good investment decisions and ensuring the value created is fairly allocated between different client categories through consistent and fair allocation of good investment ideas across different portfolios.
"Our biggest success relates to having achieved just this over the last 14 years – we have produced on average better returns than most of our competitors, and have managed to allocate this fairly to clients, as evidenced by very low portfolio dispersion rates."
Get the latest issue of FAnews