The Judging Panel

The 2008 judging panel is below:

James Smith
Editor of Investment Week and Chair of the Judging Panel
James Smith has worked on Investment Week since December 2000, first as features editor, then as assistant editor, then deputy editor. While working on Investment Week he also edited a stand-alone monthly title, Investment Strategies.

Lawrence Gosling
Editorial Director at Incisive Media
Lawrence Gosling is the group editorial director of Incisive Media and the founding editor of Investment Week, for which he stills writes a weekly column, Gosling's Grouse. He was also the launch editor of IFAonline, and Mortgage Solutions, Cover and Bloomberg Money magazines, and one of the original judges for the Gold Standards.

Robert Burdett
Joint Head, Multi-Manager Division, Thames River
Robert Burdett and Gary Potter head the multi-manager division at Thames River. They left Credit Suisse last year after joining in August 2001. Before that, Robert was at Rothschild Asset Management Ltd (RAM) where he was a main board director. At RAM he was also jointly responsible for a multi-manager business with approx USD 1.8bn under management. He has 17 years investment experience, over ten of which have been in the multi-manager field, and holds a diploma from the Securities & Investment Institute.

Gary Potter
Joint Head, Multi-Manager Division, Thames River
Gary Potter and Robert Burdett head the multi-manager division at Thames River. They left Credit Suisse last year after joining in August 2001. Before that, Gary was at Rothschild Asset Management Ltd (RAM) where he was a main board director. At RAM he was also jointly responsible for a multi-manager business with approx USD 1.8bn under management. He has over 20 years investment experience, of which over ten have been involved with multi-manager, prior to which his responsibilities extended to private client fund management with specific focus on asset allocation and stock research. He is an associate member of the Securities & Investment Institute.

John Chatfeild-Roberts
Director of Jupiter International Group plc
John Chatfeild-Roberts has been head of the Jupiter Independent Funds Team since March 2001. He is responsible, together with Peter Lawery and Algy Smith-Maxwell, for managing some £740m in long only and long/short portfolios. Prior to joining Jupiter, John spent six years as head of the fund of funds team at Lazard Asset Management and between 1989 and 1995, managed multi-manager portfolios at Henderson Global Investors. John, who is 42, studied economics at Durham University and is a Fellow of the Securities & Investment Institute.

John Husselbee
Chief Executive at North
John Husselbee has accumulated over 20 years investment experience, with 15 of those years spent running multi-manager portfolios. He spent 10 years at Henderson Global Investors, where he was director of multi-manager investment. Previously, he was director of multi-manager at Rothschild Asset Management. In August 2005, John launched North, a company created to work in partnership with firms looking to develop their own multi-manager services. The multi-manager range of funds at City Financial are amongst a number of fund mandates.

Mark Dampier
Head of Research at Hargreaves Lansdown
Mark Dampier has been in financial services since 1983 and has considerable experience in financial planning and investment. His views are often quoted in national newspapers and he is a regular contributor on radio and television financial spots.

Richard Romer-Lee
Research Director at OBSR
Richard Romer-Lee is one of the founders of OBSR and has overall responsibility for investment research and investment consultancy. Richard has over 20 years of industry experience and has been involved in investment manager appraisal and selection since 1994.

Judging Panel for the Active, Balanced and Cautious Managed Awards

An external panel is used in this category comprising of:

Tim Cockerill
Head of Research at Rowan & Co
Tim Cockerill holds an honours degree in economics. He joined Rowan in 2004 and has worked with a number of leading IFAs as well as working as a consultant to investment companies. He has 18 years investment experience.

Justine Fearns, AWD Group
Head of Investment Research
Justine Fearns started in financial services in 1998 as an administrator before moving into a sales role in 1999. In 2002 she joined Chase de Vere’s research team and is now AWD Group’s investment specialist. She is responsible for investment product and fund selection and is a member of AWD Group’s Investment Steering Group, which decides company policy on issues such as risk profiling and asset allocation.

Richard Romer-Lee, OBSR
Mark Dampier, Hargreaves Lansdown

Alongside

James Smith, Editor, Investment Week
Lawrence Gosling, Editorial Director, Incisive Media

The Judging Process

The first stage of the judging process involved running a quants screen across the entire UK unit trust and Oeic universe, using statistics provided by Morningstar up to 31 March 2008. All figures are bid to bid with net income reinvested at ex-dividend, not payment date.

The quants screen, the same as that employed in previous years, looks at each fund’s percentile ranking within its own IMA sector over each of the three discrete years to 31 March 2008. The screen gives a 20% weighting to the percentile ranking achieved during the 12 months to 31 March 2006, 30% to the period to 31 March 2007 and 40% to the year to 31 March 2008. In addition a 10% weighting is given to the fund’s Sortino ratio.
These four separate figures are added up to give a single number, with the highest possible score being 100.

Using this database the panel then stripped out any fund that: had less than £15m of assets as of 31 March 2008; had a manager with less than a three year track record on that portfolio; was aimed solely at institutional or charities investors; or was not in the top half of its IMA peer group over the 12 months to the end of March 2008.

In 2008, like previous years, the judging panel chose to include select offshore funds. The offshore universe of funds, which was restricted to FSA-recognised vehicles that have distributor status, was assessed using the same quants screen as described above, however, an additional qualitative element was also introduced. The judging panel first selected funds from the onshore list and supplemented this with offshore funds, which also scored highly on the above quants basis. In selecting the offshore funds, however, the panel favoured portfolios it felt were actively marketed and relevant to the UK retail market.

Once this had been done, the panel then constructed its Investment Week peer groups made up either of an individual IMA sector, or a composite of two or more. The quants scores were used to draw up the shortlist in each Investment Week category and questionnaires were then sent to those managers who had made it through to that stage of the process. The answers to these questionnaires were used as the basis for picking the winner in each category.

In any category where a fund is shortlisted from a group at which a member of the panel works, that panel member does not vote on who should win the award. In the case of the Asset Allocator Award in 2008 an entirely separate judging panel was used. This was because the original panel, consisting of fund of funds managers felt it would not be right for them to pick a winner which contained so many of their own, or direct competitor products.

To be eligible for the Global Group of the Year Award, a fund house had to have at least one UK Equity, one European, one Asia or Japan fund, one North America and one bond fund. The panel took the quants scores for each fund in a group’s range with assets above £15m and divided it by the number of eligible funds to come up with an overall quants figure. This was then used to draw up a shortlist and the panel then used its qualitative judgement to pick a winner.

For the Specialist Investment Group of the Year Award, the panel considered smaller boutique firms which do not have the same breadth of range and uses a qualitative judgement to pick a shortlist and winner. However, to qualify a group had to have the majority of its retail fund range onshore.