slater growth fund

frugal90

Anybody know why this fund seems to be struggling a bit- like the strategy he uses but the results?

jabbahut40

frugal90 wrote: »

Anybody know why this fund seems to be struggling a bit- like the strategy he uses but the results?

What's not to like? I hold this myself and its been 1st quartile for 1 and 3 years.

http://www.trustnet.com/Factsheets/Factsheet.aspx?fundCode=WXF98A

Jabba

Totton

Is it struggling? Showing as 6th from 260 over 1 year, not so hot over 1 month but that's not a realistic term to measure performance imho.

Ryan_Futuristics

It's held up well - I'm a big fan of their approach

But we've had fairly strong growth since 2009, in which small and medium-sized companies have surged ahead

So going into less certain market conditions, many investors are favouring larger, dividend-paying companies - so the FTSE 250's dragged a bit recently

frugal90

so a good time to be a contrarian and drip feed?

TheTracker

Have you considered the possibility that performance across managers/funds is largely random and that the dice have rolled differently recently? Perhaps, as Ryan F inferred, historical performance was more down to asset class performance rather than the manager's ability to read tea leaves.

Linton

TheTracker wrote: »

Have you considered the possibility that performance across managers/funds is largely random and that the dice have rolled differently recently? Perhaps, as Ryan F inferred, historical performance was more down to asset class performance rather than the manager's ability to read tea leaves.

Its not simply either asset class performance or ability to read tea leaves. The problem is how do you define an "asset class". You could regard global equity as a single asset class, and you see everything as random. You look closer and see that particular subsets of that asset class (eg EM, Asia Pac) have provided higher performance over extended time periods long enough to be useful to investors.

OK lets go down to a particular geography - UK equity. Again look closer and you have sub classes - eg based on company size or %yield. Some have consistently performed better than average over extended time periods. You get other more subjective sub-classes such as recovery situations, mined very successfully over 25 years by Antony Bolton with Fidelity Special Situations.

So yes I would agree that asset class is far more important than a fund manager's tea leaves, but that asset class could be a reasonably well characterised small subset of the global share universe and only covered by a few, possibly one, fund managers.

So it may be the case that the slater growth fund by the use of a consistent strategy has performed consistently well without relying on tasseography. No guarantee that the strategy will perform well in the future, but not due to pure chance either.