Morningstar Awards Makes a Case for Ashburton’s Active Fund Philosophy

Ashburton, the Jersey based active investment manager, has again received recognition for its accomplishment for its active management philosophy. This time, the Ashburton European Equity Fund is the house’s star by winning the Morningstar Category Award for best European Large Cap Fund.

The objective of the Morningstar Fund Awards is to recognise funds and fund groups that have added the most value within the context of a relevant peer group for investors over the past year and longer-term. The Morningstar Category Award is given to the funds with the best risk-adjusted performance within their Morningstar Categories or groupings of Morningstar Categories, subject to qualitative review.

“We are very proud of this award as it reinforces our distinctive investment philosophy. Through our active and unconstrained methodology we are able to provide our clients with consistent returns and superior client service,” says Richard Robinson, lead manager of the Ashburton European Equity Fund.

The European Equity Fund has also recently been awarded both a Standard and Poors (S&P) A-rating and OBSR (Old Broad Street Research) A-rating. Both of these ratings reflect the distinctive and successful active management process applied to the Fund as well as its consistent strong performance within the Fund’s sector.

“We believe in adopting a common sense approach. Our allocation rationale is not driven by our benchmark’s sectoral weightings, it is driven by perceived investment opportunities, and quite often these can lead us into sectors that have been historically ignored.

We typically form a number of long-term views. But, unlike certain other thematic type funds we don’t just ‘buy’ and ‘hold’ - we look to identify the sectors that will benefit from those long-term ideas. We believe that you have to rotate your investments according to valuation, news-flow, and supply and demand dynamics.” commented Veronika Pechlaner, investment manager of the Ashburton European Equity Fund, who accepted the award at the Cape Town event on 17 March.

Ashburton launched the European Equity Fund in 1997 and since launch it is the top performing fund in its sector returning 168.28% and outperforming its MSCI benchmark by 127.52%. The Fund has also achieved consistent top quartile performance on a rolling basis over 1, 3 and 5 years. (source: Lipper as at 28 February 2010).