To spruce up an otherwise dismal set of interim results, Polar Capital announced that Georgina Hamilton will head up a UK Value long only UCITS fund by the end of January. George Godber, who resigned from Miton back in April 2016 with Hamilton, will co-head the fund with her from April.
The group’s assets under management growth was sluggish over the interim as it battled Brexit-related uncertainty and volatility. Within the six months to 30 September, AUM expanded to just £7.7bn from £7.3bn at the end of March. But redemptions of £763m would have dragged the firm’s total AUM down, if not for positive currency translational effects of £1.1bn.
The impact from redemptions was reflected in the group’s profit before tax during the period, which at £9.1m was 22% lower than the year before. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were also weaker, falling 19% to 9.33p.
Of Polar Capital’s products, its long-only equity funds proved particularly vulnerable in the wake of the EU referendum. In US dollar terms, the fund range lost approximately $540m between March and September, down 5.8%. On a sterling basis, long-equity AUM were technically £280m higher.
The firm’s Japan and North America UCITS funds also experienced “significant redemptions,” with the former seeing close to $800m in outflows over the six-month timeframe. And the asset manager predicted in its interim statement that further redemptions could be on the horizon for its Japan fund.
However, despite the team’s difficulty navigating “a challenging period” pre- and post-referendum, chief executive officer Tim Woolley reported the group had become “somewhat more positive on the outlook” for the second half.
Woolley indicated that fund inflows had picked up for its North America, Healthcare Blue Chip and Income Opportunities funds, among others, since the US election but admitted “it remains too early to suggest this is a reversal of the difficult industry conditions” experienced by the group over the first half of the financial year.
He was however, slightly more optimistic about the implications of a Trump presidency for equity markets because of the President-elect’s pledges to lower corporate taxes and soften regulatory barriers.
Shares in the AIM-listed investment manager yo-yoed during trading on Thursday. At the time of writing, they were up 1.4% at 291.6p.
