Specialist equity boutique Ardevora Asset Management has passed the five-year anniversary for its fund range, with each of its distinctive strategies significantly outperforming its respective benchmark since inception.
Ardevora’s investment team, which now manages in excess of GBP3 billion of assets, consists of founders Jeremy Lang and William Pattisson and fellow partners Ben Fitchew and Gianluca Monaco.
The team’s unique investment process is grounded in cognitive psychology and aims to exploit biases inherent in the three participants in equity markets: company management, analysts and investors.
Since its launch on 11 January 2011, the GBP213 million Ardevora UK Income Fund delivered a 72.6 per cent return to end February 2016, against just 44.9 per cent for its IA UK Equity Income sector.
The group’s GBP134 million UK Equity Fund, a long-short 150/50 portfolio, has returned 84.4 per cent since inception on 14 February 2011 to end February 2016, with the IA UK All Companies sector seeing a rise of just 33.3 per cent over this period.
Ardevora’s GBP485 million Global Equity Fund, another long and short 150/50 portfolio, has also enjoyed strong absolute and relative performance since launch on 21 February 2011. It has climbed 74.2 per cent since inception to end February 2016, against just 29.5 per cent for the IA Global sector.
The boutique also has a fourth investment strategy, the GBP244 million Ardevora Global Equity Long-only Fund. Since inception on 29 November 2013, the portfolio has delivered a return of 22.8 per cent, against 8.6 per cent for the IA Global sector.
Jeremy Lang, founder and partner of Ardevora Asset Management, says: “We are pleased our distinctive investment process, which is grounded in cognitive psychology, continues to help our investors navigate through what are becoming increasingly volatile investment markets.
“Our investment process lies at the heart of everything we do. In a systematic way, we aim to exploit the behaviour of other participants in the market. When we look at companies, we believe it is critical to understand how and why company managers, investors and analysts sometimes make irrational decisions.”
