The one outlier is Jason Pidcock’s £1.1bn Newton Asian Income Fund that only just made a positive return for his investors, at 0.27% for the past year.
The roll call of managers that have failed to give investors more money than they had on 1 January this year includes some of the greats in the industry such as Angus Tulloch (First State Asia Pacific Leaders down 4.5%), Mark Mobius (Templeton Asian Growth down 9.4%), Ezra Sun (Veritas Asian down 17%) and the entire team at Aberdeen Asset Managers (the Aberdeen Global Asian Smaller Companies Fund is the biggest culprit, with a return of -9.2%).
Their longer-term track records are far superior with three year figures up by 70%, 127.4%, 51.2% and 118.3% respectively.
Tulloch explains this by looking at the world outside Asia with contagion from the debt crisis in the eurozone and fears of a continued global slowdown.
“The market turbulence has merely reinforced our long-held view that significant unresolved problems still exist in the global economy, and by extension that corporate earnings expectations have been too optimistic,” he added.
The market is down by 16.5% year-to-date.
He does not see any immediate signs of recovery either, adding: “With governments having run out of countercyclical ammunition, the likelihood of further unorthodox policies, such as quantitative easing, has increased. This may bolster market sentiment, but will not address fundamental problems such as the significant debt overhang in developed markets.”
