Armstrong Jones keeps its crown
Fund manager Armstrong Jones, like Queen Elizabeth II, continues to enjoy a long and uninterrupted reign as the fund manager of the year with no successor in sight.
Sunday, May 21st 2000, 12:00AM
Armstrong Jones has, for the seventh consecutive year won the Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year Award.
Morningstar managing director Graham Rich says Armstrong Jones' win this year was convincing and no other manager came near it.
"It's not as though there's a second place getter biting at their heels."
He says one of the key reasons Armstrong Jones has been so successful is that it has a reasonably small range of funds and it has a tight focus on its business.
Added to that it has consistently produced good returns for unit holders in its funds.
"They have a very trim set of products and the products they have do very well," Rich says.
Armstrong Jones main funds are what can be described as vanilla-flavoured offerings, such as a New Zealand and international share funds, multi-sector funds and fixed interest funds.
It has just two specialist funds, (Australian shares and Asia Pacific shares), and no mortgage fund.
One of its defining characteristics is its strength and dominance in the property area with the MFL and SIL superannuation funds it manages. In this respect Armstrong Jones is quite unusual as it is the biggest player in managed property funds market.
During the year the company added a cash management fund to its line up.
Fyfe says the company isn't big on introducing funds which are "flavour of the month," rather it wants to establish funds which "stand the test of time."
He says Armstrong Jones is looking at adding some other funds to its arsenal.
Fyfe says the people within the organisation are one of its key strengths.
"The thing about funds management is that you can't see it, you can't smell it and you can't touch it," he says. "All you've got are people."
In line with its recently stated objective Armstrong Jones is preparing to move from being a fund manager to being a financial services company. This move will see it start to sell insurance policies later this year.
The idea is that it will rebadge another company's policies. It will only be offering products such as term life, trauma and income protection policies, and won't be entering any of the life assurance product ranges such as whole of life or endowment policies.
FOR A FULL LIST OF WINNERS GO TO THE FEATURES SECTION
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