The Bennelong equity market neutral fund, which won the award for the best market neutral fund in Australia in 2008, has defied the shorting ban on financial stocks to report an impressive return of 7.88% in February to bring results for 2009 year-to-date to 14.02%.
Annualised performance over six years has been 23.97%, whilst performance in the past 12 months of arguably the most difficult market conditions since the great depression have been 30.54%.
Bennelong suffered some fund outflows in the final quarter of 2008 as offshore fund of funds struggled with liquidity issues, but has vindicated remaining investors' faith by outperforming the ASX200 by over 25% in just two months, and by 70% over the past year.
Bennelong manages just over A$50 million using a relative value pairs strategy which has provided 83% positive months since inception and has a rolling 12 month Sharpe ratio of 1.6.
