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Hedge Clippings | Friday 11 October, 2019
Diversification - the key to good performance and reducing risk.
Given the overall sideways nature of the market (albeit with some day to day volatility) and the dominance of the top 20 or 50 stocks, outperformance is likely to come from stock picking at the smaller end of the market.
While it's early days for September fund performance, with just under 20% of funds having reported to date, at first glance those funds focusing on the small cap end of the market provided their investors with some stellar returns last month. While the ASX200 accumulation index returned 1.84% for the month, a number of funds returned over 4%, with the top 3 to date, Bennelong's Emerging Companies Fund, Cyan's CG3, and Celeste's Australian Small Company's Fund reporting 9.92%, 8.62% and 5.40% respectively.
Obviously one month's performance is not an end unto itself, and a longer-term analysis is required, but with the ASX200 up around 12% over 12 months - assisted by falling interest rates - 15% of the funds in AFM's database are outperforming, and within that group some returning over twice that amount.
Regular followers of Hedge Clippings would know that our preferred approach is to invest in funds by creating a diversified portfolio of funds, thereby reducing risk without necessarily reducing performance. In fact, by selecting funds with a low correlation to each other, performance can actually increase whilst volatility, and risk of capital loss, decreases.
Going forward we will be discussing this - with examples - in more detail. Watch this space.
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