Seventy-nine managers have made it onto the shortlist for this year’s FE Alpha Manager of the Year Awards, with Barry Norris, Rupert Flemming, Julian Fosh, Anthony Cross and Anthony Robertson leading the list of the industry’s top talent.
The list consists of 16 categories, including FE Alpha Manager of the Year, Best New FE Alpha Manager as well as Best Boutique Manager.
This year fund groups BlueBay, Ardevora and Churchhouse have made an appearance in the shortlist alongside well-known groups like Old Mutual – which has the highest number of managers in this year’s shortlist (five).
Argonaut and Henderson follow with four managers each.
Research manager Charles Younes from FE Research says: “The FE Alpha Manager ratings recognise a manager’s ability to create risk-adjusted alpha, outperformance in both rising and falling markets, and those who consistently beat their sector peers. The FE Alpha Manager awards recognise the very best talent in our industry – those who can combine consistency with phenomenal outperformance over the past year. No small feat if you take into consideration the truly difficult market conditions that they have had to navigate since last summer.
“In order to narrow down to the very top managers, we initially used the FE Alpha Manager ratings to get the highest-scoring managers. Once we had a more refined list, we used qualitative analysis to pick the brightest stars.”
While the managers in most of the sectors were picked through a mix of quantitative and qualitative assessment, the process of elimination for the Best Manager in Bull Market and Best Manager in Bear Market categories was slightly different. FE Research looked at specific performance ratios such as bear/bull beta or maximum drawdown to identify the best managers in these different environments.
To select the Best Boutique Manager, FE Research looked for a niche strategy as well as the number of managers/staff in the firm. Although AUM was considered, it was not used as an absolute definer.
The winners of each category will be announced at the FE Alpha Manager Awards on 14th April 2016 at City Hall.
See the full shortlist here.
Read more about our latest Alpha manager rebalance.