| Report Date | |
| Manager | |
| Fund Name | |
| Strategy | |
| Latest Return Date | |
| Latest Return | |
| Latest 6 Months | |
| Latest 12 Months | |
| Latest 24 Months | |
| Annualised Since Inception | |
| Inception Date | |
| FUM (millions) | |
| Fund Overview | Harvest Lane Asset Management employs a conservative, highly selective and opportunistic approach. Using their extensive knowledge in the area of corporate actions, the Fund's managers assess each opportunity based on a thoughtful, diligent and disciplined process and invest where they believe an opportunity exists to generate above average investment returns relative to the risk incurred. Investment decisions are made without speculating on market direction, with rigid risk controls enforced to minimise the risk of large losses of investor capital. The Fund invests in securities that are predominantly listed on the ASX and occasionally in those listed in other developed markets. Equity swaps and other derivatives may be used at times to reduce risk. The fund typically holds high levels of cash in the absence of sufficiently attractive opportunities to deploy investor capital in accordance with its objectives. |
| Manager Comments | A key tenet of the Absolute Return Fund strategy is the focus on downside protection through careful selection of positions that are not only uncorrelated to broader equity markets, but also uncorrelated with each other. As a result, periods of strong outperformance against the market are usually observed when the market is going through periods of excessive weakness. This is backed up by the Fund's Sharpe and Sortino ratios since inception, 1.00 and 1.71 respectively, which, by contrast with the Index's Sharpe of 0.62 and Sortino of 0.85, emphasise the Fund's capacity to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns whilst ensuring investors' capital is protected. This is also supported by the Fund's down-capture ratio since inception of -34.93%, indicating that, on average, the Fund has significantly outperformed in the market's negative months. Harvest Lane noted a plethora of factors were identified as potential causes of the declines seen in October, including US interest rate concerns, fears of a US/China trade war, the start of a deflation in equity asset 'bubbles', emerging market currency crises, Brexit, and instability in the EU. They believe investors' heavy biases to risky long-only equity strategies is a major risk factor that is all too easily forgotten in a decade long bull market. They noted that volatility has only just moved back to more normal levels and equity markets are capable of much worse performance than has been seen in the low volatility environment of recent years. |
| More Information |
