Aviva Investors Takes Top Award

Aviva Investors has taken out this year’s Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year award.

Aviva secured the top honours last week ahead of fellow Australian fund managers and finalists Perpetual Investments and Schroders.

Morningstar co-head of fund research Tim Murphy said the decision to award the prize to Aviva stemmed from the group’s overall performance.

“They were finalists in two other categories, in listed property and in small companies, and they also had yet another very good year in Australian large-cap equities. They weren’t far off being a finalist in that category, which they had been in the last couple of years,” Murphy said.

“It’s a consistent continued strong performance across those three different capabilities and in particular in equities over a number of years now. We thought they really stood out and it was time for them to have their time in the sun.”

He said Aviva was in a firm position to continue its strong performance in the year ahead.

“Absolutely, all of those capabilities we have on recommended ratings. We have several of their Australian large-cap equities, their small caps, their Australian listed property we all recommend,” he said.

“We have conviction that they can continue to repeat that effort.”

Other winners on the night were BlackRock Global Allocation, which took out the multi-sector award, PIMCO/Equity Trustees, which took out the award for fixed interest manager of the year, while Perpetual Investments took home the award for domestic equities fund manager of the year.

Perennial Value won the award for domestic equities – small caps, IFP Global Franchise took home the award for international equities, Vanguard Investments International Property took out the award for listed property manager of the year while Franklin Templeton Multi-sector Bond took out emerging manager of the year.

Methodology

Only fund managers with managed funds available for sale in Australia qualify for inclusion in the Morningstar Australian Fund Manager of the Year Awards, and only their retail and wholesale unit trusts, superannuation funds, and pension funds are considered. This created a portfolio of eligible funds for each fund manager in each sector, called the fund manager’s “fund portfolio”. Detailed analysis is then conducted on these funds.

Winners are determined by a combination of qualitative research by Morningstar’s fund analysts; risk-adjusted medium- to long-term track record; and performance in the 2010 calendar year.

Each fund manager’s qualifying funds are aggregated on an asset-weighted basis within each award category to form an overall “fund portfolio”. The track record for a fund portfolio is derived from a combination of Morningstar’s Risk-Adjusted Return measure over the three- and five-year periods.

Funds with less than a three-year track record are not included. The five-year period accounts for 60 per cent and the three-year period for 40.per cent. If only three years of data is available, the three-year figure alone is used. The one-year performance criterion for a fund portfolio is based on the asset-weighted average for the 2010 calendar year. Unlike the track record calculation, the one-year ranking is not risk-adjusted.

Morningstar’s fund research team is responsible for providing the qualitative opinion of the fund portfolio.

This qualitative assessment considers the relative quality of the fund manager’s people, process, philosophy, and style, along with business and investment disciplines during the 2010 calendar year and over the longer term.

The qualitative assessment also captures practical issues that quantitative screens cannot. The fund portfolio’s track record, one-year performance, and the fund research team’s analysis are combined to determine each sector winner for the 2010 calendar year.

Source: Morning Star