While recent research from Standard & Poor’s (S&P)1, announced this week, shows that most active Australian equities managers are failing to beat the index, Aviva Investors is one of the few managers to deliver outperformance over 1, 3 and 5 years.

S&P’s research found that for the five years to December 2010, more than 70 per cent of actively managed Australian equity funds underperformed the S&P/ASX 200 Accumulation Index.

The short-term figures were equally unsettling for investors: 81 percent of actively managed Australian equity funds underperformed the S&P/ASX 200 Accumulation Index in the year to end-December 2010.

Conversely, all of Aviva Investors’ actively managed Australian equities funds that have a 5-year track record have significantly outperformed their benchmarks over the 3 years and 5 years to December 2010.

In addition, Aviva Investors’ short-term performance numbers are also impressive with every fund significantly outperforming their benchmarks in the 12 months to December 2010.

“For many investors, it is clearly disappointing to hear that they are paying active fees to their investment manager to not even meet the index, never mind outperform it,” said Aviva Investors Head of Equities Glenn Hart.

“At Aviva Investors we are proud to say that we have delivered excess returns to our investors over both the long-term and the short-term. We do not believe that investors should have to choose between either short-term or long-term outperformance and have shown that the right manager can deliver both.”

Mr Hart said that this investment outperformance has been achieved by focusing on quality, in-house research.

“We believe markets are inherently inefficient and this results in stocks sometimes trading away from their underlying valuation for a period of time. We seek to exploit these mispricing opportunities by looking for stocks which are out of favour with the market.

“Our decision to invest is based on a detailed bottom-up analysis of the company’s future prospects, in which we have formed an in-house valuation which is significantly different to the consensus. We believe that adherence to this approach should produce consistent outperformance of the benchmark over the medium-to-long term in all but extreme market conditions.”

Professional Selection Australian Equities – Strong outperformance as at 31 December 2010

Investment returns are based on exit to exit prices of Professional Selection units, are net of management fees and assume reinvestment of all distributions. Past performance is not a guide to or indication of future performance.

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