Christmas has come early for the bank’s shareholders with the decision to slightly increase the 2024 dividend – despite a single-digit decline in the net profit and cash earnings.
Beating the market benchmark is never easy, with 72 per cent of Australian actively managed global equity general funds trailing the S&P World Index in the six months to June 30, 2024. Domestic equity funds performed slightly better, albeit against a significantly lower bar set by the S&P/ASX 200 Index.
Hyperion lists flagship global fund
Hyperion Asset Management’s top-performing global equity fund, which has beaten its benchmark by a wide margin since inception in 2014, lists as an exchange-quoted managed fund on the ASX today (March 22).
The listing (ASX: HYGG) continues a dream start to the year for the Brisbane-based boutique, which sits under the Pinnacle Investment Management multi-affiliate umbrella. The firm took out three of the four top awards at the Morningstar Australia annual awards event last month, including Fund Manager of the Year.
The global fund was a finalist in the global equities category at the awards, won by T. Rowe Price, but investors wouldn’t have minded missing out on that. Its net return after all fees and charges was 40.6 per cent in the year to February 28, compared with the benchmark MSCI World Index (gross) of 8.2 per cent. The annualised three-year return was 27.6 per cent (MSCI 16.0 per cent), five years 24.5 per cent (11.6 per cent) and since inception 22.9 per cent (10.2 per cent).
The fund’s net return has improved even further over its benchmark in the early part of 2021. The two other Morningstar awards Hyperion did win this year were for Australian equities large-caps and its Australian equities small-caps fund, both of which also had stellar performance.
When he accepted the main award for Hyperion, Mark Arnold, the chief investment officer, said almost half of the manager’s total funds under management, since launching the business 25 years ago, had come from the alpha generated by performance after fees.
The exchange-quoted managed fund system, pioneered by Magellan and its administrator Mainstream BPO (itself listed and currently subject to a friendly takeover bid), allows managers to effectively list existing funds without having to go through the expense of setting up a new corporate structure. Investors can choose listed or unlisted versions and even trade between them to take advantage of any arbitrage opportunities as they may rise.
For the distributors, such as Pinnacle, this potentially offers a significantly larger universe of investors to whom to pitch their managers. Pinnacle has 16 affiliated managers with combined assets under management of about $70 billion. Hyperion contributes just over $10 billion to that total. The global fund is its first listed product.
