By MARK HINTON 05/10/2006
Skandia have blended together a high quality group of 10 investment managers and given them each the freedom to select their top ten best stock ideas. The remit is UK focussed and has few constraints imposed. Essentially investors are reliant on manager stock selection skills. The portfolio of up to 100 stocks will at times deviate markedly from the benchmark. Skandia monitor individual manager performance and may change a manager at any time but they do not enforce a top down view of the UK economy so any sector allocation is purely a function of the stock ideas.
Bestinvest research rate the majority of the individual managers highly. The ten managers that are currently included in the Skandia UK Best Ideas strategy are:- Richard Plackett – Merrill Lynch, Mark Tyndall – Artemis, George Luckraft - AXA Framlington, Stephen Whittaker – New Star, Ashley Willing – Gartmore, Ashton Bradbury – Old Mutual, Tony Nutt – Jupiter, Richard Buxton – Schroders (no current rating), Carl Stick – Rathbones (no current rating), Roger Whiteoak – AXA Framlington.
Many of these managers may already be incorporated within client portfolios and as such clients may prefer to weight exposure by market capitalisation and managers themselves.
The concept of best of breed managers concentrating ideas is very interesting, however, returns may be volatile and charges are on the high side, so performance will need to be strong to justify these. We award this fund a new three star rating.