Gam’s Anthony Smouha named Alpha Manager of the year

Gam Investment’s Anthony Smouha took home the biggest prize at the FE Fundinfo Alpha Manager Awards on Wednesday, beating some pretty stiff competition to take the title of Alpha Manager of the Year 2022.

Smouha, who runs the £2.9bn Gam Star Credit Opportunities strategy, was up against Wellington’s John Boselli, Comgest’s Franz Weis, Baillie Gifford’s Tom Slater and Julian Fosh from Liontrust.

He also picked up the gong for the Sterling Strategic Bond asset class category, pipping managers from Sanlam, Jupiter, M&G and Nomura.

Charles Younes, research manager at FE Investments, said: “There’s no question that it has been a very testing two years for the investment industry. As we have moved from a Covid economy to a period of high interest rates and inflation, one set of challenging circumstances has been replaced by another and again, fund managers are coming under enormous amounts of pressure to demonstrate their value.

“But throughout this, Anthony Smouha has guided his Gam fund through these difficult times and has consistently outperformed his sector and index benchmarks. A very worthy winner in a very competitive field, Anthony joins the most esteemed names within the industry, including last year’s winner Douglas Brodie and 2020’s joint winners Julian Fosh and Anthony Cross.”

The winners across all 12 categories were determined by narrowing down the total list of FE Fundinfo alpha-rated mangers to a shortlist of the highest scoring per category.

A qualitative overlay is then applied to the refined shortlists to select the eventual winners.