Franklin Templeton had more rated managers across Europe in October than any other – but the group missed the top grades by failing to score a single AAA rating.
US equity manager JP Scandalios (pictured above) is AA-rated, while his colleagues, California-based Grant Bowers and Conrad Herrmann, receive first-time ratings. The duo jointly manage the Franklin US Opportunities fund, and debut with A ratings across Europe.
Franklin Templeton’s crew, in fact, leads the tables in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, with eight rated managers in each country. In Sweden, the group places nine managers in the ratings table.
In Germany, however, it meets with more competition as it shares the highest number of rated managers with DWS Investments. The latter boasted five As, two AAs and one AAA, beating its competitor by achieving the highest rating through Marc Alexander Kniess, who manages the DWS Intervest fund.
The $515.1 million Franklin US Opportunities fund, which has lifted Bowers and Herrmann to their A ratings, has industry biases towards technology, hardware and equipment at 18.7%, and pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and life sciences, which accounts for 15.5%. Software and services is not far behind at 15.1%.
Over three years the fund has returned 22.53%, against a rise of 19.75% by the benchmark Russell 3000 Growth Index over the same period.
Herrmann joined the firm in 1983 as a fixed income analyst and now heads up the growth style team, but has specialist expertise in the electronic technology sector. He has worked on the fund since 2006, along with lead Bowers, who also has a background in research, specialising in the telecoms service industry.
JP Scandalios, who is AA-rated, also manages the Franklin Technology fund. The fund has a geographic split skewed towards the US at 83.8% with the total assets weightier in equities at 93.9%. The industrial split is towards technology hardware and equipment at 32.7%, software and services at 30.5%, semiconductors and semicon equipment at 19.8%, and telecom services at 3.9%, while retailing is lowest at 3.3%.
Global equity manager Francisco Javier Pérez from Banca March in Spain moved up to an AA rating in October. Pérez shifted his portfolio into defensive stocks and US exporters in a move that at least temporarily repositioned him away from cyclical companies and leveraged firms where he was overweight earlier this year. He has been running the March Global fund since December 2000.
He told Citywire in an interview earlier this month that he was still overweight in industrials and natural resources such as coal and steel, and expected to take advantage of the strong demand from emerging countries.
Frédéric Plisson of Paris based Financiere de L’Echiquier makes his ratings debut this month, coming straight in at the highest level with an AAA in Italy and Switzerland. He has been running the Echiquier Major fund since 2002, using a bottom-up style focused on sensibly priced European growth stocks with a market capitalisation of more than €1 billion.
The group has a history of performing well during times of crisis and the management style has allowed Plisson not only to avoid the extremes of the downturn but also to come back strongly as the market rebounded. As a result the fund has had its best year yet, reporting returns of 7.15% when the benchmarks saw falls of 6.88% (DJ Stoxx 50), and 1.25% (FTSE Europe TR EUR).
Meanwhile Société Général Asset Management’s Tokyo-born Hiromitsu Kamata gains an AAA rating with the SGAM Fund Equities Japan Target, which he has managed since 2004.
Investing in undervalued Japanese companies, the fund uses hedging instruments such as forwards, futures, options, swaps, options on interest rate swaps, and credit default swaps, within regulatory limits. Its biggest sector bias is in Industrials, at 31.21%.
Kamata has returned 3.6% over a five year period when the average fund manager in the sector posted losses of 15.2%. However in the past 12 months he has suffered a fall of just 0.1%, while the average manager had losses of 0.8%.
BlackRock’s newly AAA-rated Alice Gaskell features among the most highly rated managers in Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and Austria.
Meanwhile Julien Boy of Rothschild & Cie Gestion and Bruno Vacossin of Palatine Asset Management have both earned their first AAA ratings in France. Tadao Minaguchi of Morgan Stanley AM received his first AAA rating in Italy, France, Austria and Germany.
Gerhard Reichhard of W&W Asset Management and Helmut Bartsch of Baden-Wuerttembergische Bank have moved up the charts to gain an AAA rating in October in Germany – their first ever AAA rating there. Both Alken Asset Management’s Nicolas Walewski and Jean-Charles Mériaux from DNCA Finance are newly AAA-rated in Austria this October.