Previously US-based Thornburg Investment Management sub-advised the funds, but from 20 August Mundy, who is head of the firm’s contrarian team, and Wynne-Jones, who works with him on the Investec Global Special Situations Fund, will run them.
The £395m Investec American Oeic launched in September 2002 and is hosted in the IMA North America Sector. Since launch and over each discrete calendar year from 2007, with the exception of 2009, the fund has lagged its sector and benchmark.
Meanwhile, the offshore version, the GSF Investec American Equity Fund, has $78.8m in AUM and was launched in November 1990. Domiciled in Luxembourg, it has also underperformed every year since 2007 apart from 2009.
Current domain
Currently, Mundy also manages Investec’s cautious managed offering and its UK Special Situations Fund, which he has run for the past 10 years. He and Wynne-Jones have worked together on the Global Special Situations Fund since it launched in 2007.
Investec said the UK Special Situations Fund has delivered top quartile performance over one, five and ten years and the Global offering has delivered top decile performance since launch.
“The investment team has been making allocations to US equities for several years within their global equity funds and also manage dedicated US equity strategies within segregated mandates. In this are the team has also demonstrated good performance, with their US assets outperforming the S&P 500 by almost 16% since December 2007.”
Under review
Despite this performance track record, Morningstar OBSR has put the funds under review until it has met with Mundy and Wynne-Jones to discuss the implementation of their approach within the US equity mandates.
The funds will be run according to the team’s well-established contrarian investment strategy, but for now Morningstar OBSR’s previous rating of silver will be on hold.
