Melville Jessup Weaver (MJW) has added 10 new global equity funds to its quarterly investment survey to reflect the wider menu of NZ-domiciled products offered via institutions.
Ben Trollip, MJW principal, said the suite of portfolio investment entity (PIE) global equity funds – typically bundled in multi-manager packages – were also available to NZ investors as stand-alone products.
The 10 new international share funds in the MJW line-up include: Schroders, Orbis, Hexavest, Arrowstreet and GQG from AMP Capital’s fund-of-funds product; MFS, LSV, Vontobel and Franklin Templeton from ANZ Investments multi-manager fund; and, the relatively new Nikko global equities NZ fund managed by an Edinburgh-based team (previously Scottish Widows).
With the exception of the Nikko fund all of the cut-loose global equity PIEs are wholesale-only but Trollip said they opened up flexible opportunities for NZ investors.
“For a long time NZ investors were starved for choice of global equity funds [structured for local conditions] but now they have access to a number of high-quality managers,” he said.
Colonial First State Global Asset Management (CFSGAM) has also developed a new PIE recipe for its Global Listed Infrastructure Fund – the most popular external product in NZ for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned (CBA) investment manager.
At least one other international equities manager is also expected to launch a PIE for NZ investors in the next few months.
The MJW shows a wide diversity of returns among the expanded list of global shares managers with most – excluding a few growth managers – falling into the red over the March quarter.
For the three months to March 31 unhedged international equity manager performance ranged from -7.4 per cent for the NZ-based Elevation Capital to 2.8 per cent for the Boston-headquartered Wellington Management’s growth fund. Over the 12-month period to March 31 global share growth managers also generally outperformed value and style-neutral counterparts in the MJW survey: the growth-oriented Harbour Asset Management-fronted T Rowe Price fund topping the annual performance charts with 23.1 per cent while value manager Elevation’s -2.8 per cent was the worst result over the annual period.
The MJW report says while labels such as ‘value’ and ‘growth’ give a broad steer on manager strategies investors need to “fully understand the investment philosophy of the fund in question”.
“As Warren Buffet famously said, growth and value are ‘joined at the hip’,” the report says.