Thinking independently and buying the best assets

Oksana Patron

23 August 2023

A combination of strong educational background, rigorous financial research and strong conviction in your ability to make the right decisions are the most important talents for a fund manager, according to Ashley Pittard who runs Pendal’s Concentrated Global Share Fund and has been recognised as the Financial Newswire/SQM Research 2023 Star Manager.

Pittard, who is one of Australia’s longest serving global manager with almost 25 years of experience in this role and almost 30 years of experience in valuing global assets, comes from petroleum engineering and accounting backgrounds and started his career as a research analyst for commodities companies during the Asian crisis.

He credited his training in engineering and accounting as a key part of his success as a portfolio manager. He said that the combination of these two disciplines helped him to pull apart the often complex businesses and see how they could sit together as well as determine their real value.

Describing the key talents for aspiring fund managers, he emphasised the most important components which helped him earn his current position and this included a strong financial engineering and accounting background, rigorous financial research and strong conviction in your decisions.

“I would say the last one, which a lot of people do not mention, is – don’t have an ego,” Pittard added.

“And the reason why I say ‘don’t have an ego’ is because the equity markets are very humbling so at some point you will get it wrong, even though you have a strong conviction and you have done your research, every once in while you will get things wrong.

“It’s easy when things are going up but when the things are going bad, you need to have self-discipline and the confidence in your decision and that is very difficult.

According to him, this is also one of the reasons why there are so few fund managers who have careers of more than 10 to 15 years.

“People have to think independently. But you also have to have the courage to believe in your decisions and let them play out over time.”

Speaking about his investment philosophy, he described it as an ability of finding and understating the best assets in the world, “the crème de la crème”, and then waiting patiently for them to be out of favour short-term.

“I like to buy waterfront assets [waterfront businesses] when they experience the flood,” he explained.

“And then, I am able to buy them after a flood and then just [have] a patience to let them grow or normalise over time. I call it a private equity business owner approach which is very different.”

Pittard also said that his fund was index unaware and, contrary to many other fund managers, he looked at a longer time horizon (between seven to ten years).

Celebrate the achievements of the 2023 Star Managers and broader Fund Manager of the Year awards finalists with us at our gala dinner on Thursday 14 September from 6pm at the Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney. Tickets are on sale now and you can find more information about the awards and event here.