Who are the top three fund managers in Europe? The Morningstar European Fund Manager of the Year Awards have revealed the top spots for European Equity, Global Equity and Fixed-Income, drawing upon qualitative analysis to reveal the individuals who demonstrate long-term commitment to their investors.
Each of this year’s award winners has certainly done that, delivering exceptional experience to investors over the long term.
Fund Manager of the Year: European Equity
Martin Skangberg: Schroder European
Martin Skanberg is a seasoned manager with over 20 years’ experience who has followed the same style-agnostic investment approach for over a decade. His investment process is primarily bottom-up, drawing heavily on the fundamental research of Schroder’s European equity team for investment ideas. He has a core portfolio, but will tilt the portfolio more towards value or growth depending on where he sees the best ideas, using his interpretation of the research coming through from the underlying analysts.
Skanberg has proved highly effective at leveraging his supporting analytical resources, undoubtedly helped by his previous experience as an analyst and head of research, and as a result, investors have benefited from consistently high returns driven primarily by strong stock selection. Such success has seen Skanberg amass significant assets over the years, and his sensible attitude to capacity management - maintaining a minimum market cap of €1 billion on investments – has allowed him to keep the strategy scalable.
Fund Manager of the Year: Global Equity
Jeremy Podger: Fidelity Global Special Situations
Jeremy Podger has 30 years’ investment experience, for over two decades of which he has successfully managed global equity mandates at investment houses, including Investec and Threadneedle before joining Fidelity and taking over the Fidelity Global Special Situations fund in 2012. His approach is best described as core, but he can be considered pragmatic, and is happy to tilt the portfolio in line with his top-down views with regards to value/growth and by region/sector within the parameters of the mandate. He has shown an ability to read markets very well over the years, although this has always been to set the context of the portfolio rather than to drive its positioning, with stock selection being the main driver of returns on this fund and throughout his career.
Podger has always managed to make highly effective use of the resources available to him. At Threadneedle he had a dedicated global equities team that would undertake its own research and interpret that of the group’s regional teams work in a global context. At Fidelity, he is not able to direct the research in the same way, but he has clearly adapted to the group’s analyst bank setup very quickly.
Fund Manager of the Year: Fixed-Income
Sander Bus and Roeland Moraal: Robeco High Yield Bonds
Sander Bus and Roeland Moraal are very experienced high-yield managers held in high regard by Morningstar. Bus has been involved with the Robeco High Yield Bonds fund since its launch in 1998, initially as co-manager and since 2001 as lead manager, while Moraal joined as a co-manager in 2003. Both are supported by a well-resourced credit analyst team and both have personal investments in the fund, which help align their interests with those of their investors.
Bus and Moraal apply a solid and proven investment process driven by in-depth bottom-up research combined with a good sense of risk awareness, and have demonstrated their ability to add value through superior credit selection and favourable credit beta management in both upward and downward markets.
Under Bus as lead manager, the fund has outperformed the Morningstar Category by wide margins and outperformed its own benchmark over a ten-year period, which is a high hurdle to overcome in high-yield bonds. Risk-adjusted returns are also impressive, landing the fund in and around the top decile over three-, five- and ten-year periods.
