The Fund performed strongly in the first quarter of 2012 comfortably outperforming the FTSE All Share index and placing the Fund in the second quartile of it peer group (i.e. the IMA UK All Companies universe).
The Fund benefited from its bias to the strongly performing mid caps at the expense of the large caps. The key contributor to the Fund’s performance came from stock picking with good returns from the oil & gas, basic materials and consumer services areas. From a sector perspective the Fund benefited from its largest sector overweight’s namely industrials and technology, but the underweight to financials, particularly the banks proved to be unhelpful.
Over the quarter all four sub-managers outperformed the FTSE All Share index. The best return came from Four Capital who was helped by good stock selection particularly in the oil & gas sector. Within the top ten active positions there were excellent returns from Cove Energy +85.0% and Cape +25.8%.
Whilst Jupiter was the best performing manager for 2011, it was the laggard over the quarter, however it still outperformed. It was not a surprise that the manager did not perform as well as the other managers given the manager’s contrarian investment style focused on value and this combined with a greater weighting to large caps compared to others held back returns.
Stock selection was the main driver of returns for Jupiter, especially in the consumer services, financials and technology sectors.
BlackRock and Legal & General comfortably outperformed the FTSE All Share index. Both managers were helped by their sector positioning as well as their size bias (i.e. preferring mid caps over large caps). BlackRock benefited from their largest overweight to industrials and IT, while the strongest contributor to performance at stock level came from the consumer services, basic materials and industrials sectors. Legal & General generated the greatest contributions from a combination of sector positioning and stock selection in the oil & gas and basic materials area with good returns from names such as Rockhopper, Yule Catto and Elementis.
31 March 2012