IN FOCUS
FUNDS
LIONTRUST SPECIAL SITUATIONS
With the bottom-up approach taken by managers Julian Fosh and Anthony Cross proving
its worth in falling markets before, is this the fund to navigate the election uncertainty?
per cent since launch.
At the moment, approximately
40 per cent of the portfolio
consists of large cap companies
and the rest is held in small and
medium caps.
This formula has gone down
well with FE Research, meaning
the fund has made its way on to
the FE Select 100 list.
The team said: “This fund
benefits from the best of the two
fund managers, as Fosh prefers
to focus on large and medium
companies and Cross on smaller
ones. We consider this fund to be
one of the best available in the UK
All Companies sector.”
The fund has achieved total
returns of 211 per cent since launch,
which is more than twice that of its
benchmark and sector average. It
has also beaten its sector in seven of
the last nine full calendar years and
its benchmark in six.
PERFORMANCE IN 2011
Liontrust - Special Situations
(7.54%)
15%
FTSE All Share
(-3.46%)
IA UK All
Companies
(-7.04%)
10%
5%
0%
-5%
-10%
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
-15%
Feb
MANAGER: Julian Fosh and
Anthony Cross
FUND SIZE: £1.48bn
SECTOR: UK All Companies
LAUNCHED: 10/11/2005
CROWN RATING:
cent, while its UK All Companies
sector and FTSE All Share
benchmark both lost money.
What’s more, Liontrust Special
Situation has a top-decile riskadjusted performance record since
launch, with a Sharpe ratio of 0.52.
The fund also has a top-decile
annualised volatility of 13.89 per
cent over the same time period.
Liontrust Special Situations
combines the best ideas of two
other funds run by Fosh and Cross
– Liontrust UK Smaller Companies
and Liontrust UK Growth. This
blend means that the fund covers
the entire UK equities universe,
giving the managers and their
team a wide selection of stocks to
choose from.
Despite having such a large
area of choice, Fosh and Cross
consistently manage to pick the
cream of the crop, which is evident
in a top-decile alpha rating of 7.13
Jan 11
A
s we enter into a time of
political uncertainty in
the UK, many investors
are selling down their domestic
exposure. Does this mean that
some top-performing funds such
as Liontrust Special Situations are
being overlooked?
Income funds have certainly
proved popular in recent years
and it’s easy to see why, but at the
same time, growth funds seem to
have been ignored.
The £1.5bn Liontrust Special
Situations fund invests in UK
companies with growth in mind and
follows a well-defined investment
process.
It is run by FE Alpha Manager
duo Julian Fosh and Anthony
Cross, who have a high-conviction
portfolio of 51 companies that offer
distinctive products with strengths
that competitors would struggle to
reproduce.
This bottom-up approach can
provide peace of mind for investors,
as the star managers’ stock picks
should, in theory, survive even the
toughest bear markets.
An example of this was the
fund’s performance in 2011. Over
the course of the year, it achieved
a positive total return of 7.54 per
Source: FE Analytics
12
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