Winners of the 2009 Morningstar UK Fund Awards
These funds and fund houses have demonstrated long-term strength that helps investors achieve success.
Morningstar UK Fund Category Awards 2009
Many of you have participated in our online Fund Category Awards Poll, and will therefore be familiar with the new Morningstar Fund Awards programme. If you're not, you can click here for all the details (for the official methodology, click here),
but suffice it to say that our overwhelming objective has been to recognise those funds that had good performance in 2009, but--most importantly--that also delivered strong risk-adjusted returns for investors over the long haul, relative to appropriate benchmarks.
We know that there's often interest in who has fared best over a given year or three years, but such figures are often very poor predictors of who will do well in the future. We therefore focused on one-, three-, and five-year performance, looking at how funds fared relative to their Morningstar Category peers, after adjusting for risk. To adjust for risk, we used the Morningstar Risk measure, a state-of-the-art measure which uses utility theory to penalise funds more for downside variation in returns than for upside volatility--in keeping with actual investor concerns.
We eliminated all institutional share classes from consideration for the awards, as these really are intended to help guide investors towards the best managers in their respective spaces. If a manager is good, he or she ought to be able to outperform even when carrying a full retail total expense ratio. Finally, our fund analysts employed a qualitative overlay to ensure that our choices hadn't suffered from major changes that might be expected to cause their future ability to outperform to differ markedly from the past. This meant, for example, that we did not select Rensburg Corporate Bond as the winner in the Sterling Corporate Bond category as former manager John Anderson left the group earlier this year.
So without further ado, here are the winners for the 2009 Morningstar Fund Category Awards. We won't detail each fund here, but investors will notice a common thread: From Cazenove’s Chris Rice to First State's Angus Tulloch, Jonathan Asante and Martin Lau, many of the funds selected exhibited a fundamentally-oriented, long-term approach to investing, and a willingness to go against the crowd. That's no accident: following the herd is rarely a recipe for success, whilst original research and the courage to back your ideas with significant assets is often what sets the very best managers apart from the pack.
| Award | Fund Name |
|---|---|
| Best UK Large-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | Newton UK Opportunities GBP Inc |
| Best UK Mid-Cap /All-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | Rensburg UK Mid-Cap Growth Inc |
| Best UK Small-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | IP UK Smaller Companies Eq Inc |
| Best Asia Pacific Equity Fund Award 2009 | First State Asia Pacific Leaders A Acc |
| Best Emerging Markets Equity Fund Award 2009 | First State Global Emerging Markets Leaders A Acc |
| Best Europe ex-UK Large-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | Cazenove European A Acc |
| Best Europe Large-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | Cazenove Pan Europe A GBP Inc |
| Best Global Large-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | MFS Meridian Glob Equity A1 USD Acc |
| Best Sterling Corporate Bond Fund Award 2009 | Standard Life AAA Income R Acc |
| Best US Large-Cap Equity Fund Award 2009 | Jupiter North American Income Inc |
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Morningstar UK Fund House Awards 2009
The principle for our fund house awards is largely the same as that of our Fund Category awards--to identify those groups that have delivered strong long-term risk adjusted performance. In this case, however, we used each house's average five-year Morningstar Rating as our primary measure. It incorporates the same risk-adjustment calculation used in the Category Awards, but it places less emphasis on the one-year period than we used for the latter. We did this because we have found that the traits that make fund houses successful are largely structural in nature and should be manifest over the long haul if they really are in place. Things like incentive structures and recruitment procedures, attitudes towards costs, and an emphasis on original research may not lead a house to the top of the charts in any given year, but they should pay off over time. Please click here to learn more about the selection process for the Fund House Awards.
The winners of our Morningstar UK Fund House Awards 2009 are as follows:
| Award | Firm Name |
|---|---|
| Best Larger Equity House Award 2009 | Threadneedle Asset Management Ltd |
| Best Larger Fixed-Interest House Award 2009 | Schroder Investment Management Ltd |
| Best Multi-Asset House Award 2009 | M&G Investment Management |
| Best Specialist Equity House Award 2009 | First State Investments |
| Best Specialist Fixed-Interest House Award 2009 | M&G Investment Management |
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