Australian Eagle fund ‘Recommended’ ratings

The Australian Eagle Trust Long-Short Fund has been upgraded to a ‘Recommended’ rating from Zenith and has been awarded an inaugural ‘Recommended’ rating by Lonsec.

 Since its inception in July 2016, the fund has returned 19.33% per annum, has outperformed the S&P/ASX 100 by 8.49% per annum and has not had a negative return in a calendar or financial year to October 2021.

“The results over more than 5 years for us cements our decision to extend our successful long only capability into the long short space in 2015,” Sean Sequeira, the Chief Investment Officer at Australian Eagle, said.

“We believed that combining our differentiated long only process with customised shorting would allow us to create a product that uses more of our intellectual property. When we look at the results, we would argue that the Fund has delivered on our ambition with increased conviction levels with higher overall portfolio quality exposure.

“As a result, clients’ have experienced higher returns with broadly similar volatility to our long only fund and Australian equity benchmarks.”

Ian Kwan, Senior Portfolio Manager also said the fund has been successful because it uses Australian Eagle’s portfolio construction capabilities and captures the firm’s “essence” of what they do.

“Our investment process is designed to identify, from our perspective, higher quality stocks in the Australian market with unappreciated potential for a re-rating due to medium term improvement in company fundamentals.

“The fund allows us to also take advantage of companies which we consider to be lower quality and where we see no medium-term opportunities for business transformation,” he said.

This comes after both Praemium and Mason Stevens recently announced the fund had been added to their platforms, following in the footsteps of HUB24, BT, Macquarie and Netwealth.

“You don’t get selected for quality platforms unless advisers are pushing for access via their preferred channels,” Sequeira said.

“Australian Eagle is thrilled to be getting this level of market interest. The proof, we believe, is in our consistent above-market returns which the planning industry is recognising.”