Ben Conway, chief investment officer and head of fund management at Hawksmoor Investment Management, discusses why he favours the UK and Japanese equity markets.
At a media event in London this month, Ben Conway at Hawksmoor
Investment Management underlined the case for investing in UK
equities, saying it is an undervalued market.
“I am excited about the UK market. It’s done so well this year,
outperforming the US, I’m frothing at the mouth,” Conway said at
the media event. “UK mid-small caps, in particular, offer strong
investment opportunities as the sentiment is so negative.”
“The UK equity market is very undervalued and it’s offering
positive returns,” he continued. “We are overweight in the UK
market. We have also liked the Japanese market for a long time –
which remains cheap – and we continue to do so.”
He is not alone in his views. Alec Cutler at Orbis
Investments also recently made the case for investing in UK and
Japanese firms, saying that they are undervalued markets.
Cutler is heavily overweight in the UK, Japanese and Korean
markets, slightly overweight in Europe and very underweight in
the US. “We favour UK mid-small caps,” Cutler said. Graham Ashby,
UK all cap fund manager at investment manager
Schroders, also believes now could be a good time for
investors to increase their exposure to UK shares. See more
commentary
here and
here.
Big consolidation in wealth management
industry
Under pressure to maintain margins in a world of ever-increasing
costs, Conway also highlighted how wealth management has
experienced an unprecedented wave of consolidation in recent
years, with no sign of a let up.
With firms getting bigger and bigger, Hawksmoor believes that
clients are being offered an increasingly homogenised product,
and that too many portfolios resemble passive funds.
Whilst recognising the benefits of passive solutions and their
place in client portfolios, Hawksmoor doesn’t see this as the
only game in town. Conway believes that small is beautiful; he
highlighted the importance of smaller open-ended funds, saying
the larger the fund the lower the probability of outperformance.
He also favours diversified portfolios, which are genuinely
different.
Headquartered in Execter, Hawksmoor, which has offices across the
UK, including London, Bath, Harrogate, Salisbury, Taunton
and Worcester, has over £5 billion ($6.4 billion) of assets under
management and advice.
