GRTV speaks with Paul Huxford on the current fund management challenges being faced by ANZ Investments' KiwiSaver team.
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW How hard has it been for you as a fund manager to manage this massive KiwiSaver pool of money during such a volatile period of time? Well, the complexity in terms of what we've seen and what is in front of us, I guess to state the obvious, has been pretty large. The speed of the declines that we've seen in some markets is almost unprecedented. And I guess in terms of the bounce, if you think about the US equity market that's been pretty interesting. We've kept very focused during this time in terms of directing our own research effort into the key issues that we think that we need to be thinking about. And also, taking research from
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the various research providers that we pay for and other sources as well. So a big part of that is just making sure that we're looking sufficiently far out. That we're aware of the near-term issues. And then, I guess, filtering, I guess, trying to filter out all of the noise, and trying to stay really true to our investment philosophy, and what holds us in good stead. So I think we're doing a great job of that. So, so far so good.
Have you had to make any big changes in your portfolios? Yes, at the end of Q3 we moved to an underweight position in terms of international equity. So we did that very, very swiftly. We recognised what was happening globally in terms of Covid-19, but
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I guess, like a lot of people the speed of that has had an impact across portfolios. And we haven't lost sight of the long term, but we continue to also focus a reasonable amount of effort on our tactical asset allocation. So we have been quite busy from that perspective as well, but both in equities and in foreign exchange and fixed income as well. So where we are now, we're relatively neutrally positioned in equities. We're slightly underweight fixed income and carrying good levels of cash, looking for opportunities as they may arise. To give you a sense of performance just looking at draft numbers, our conservative fund, if I look at that from last year sort of 8, 9% for the quarter, that looks like being down about 1.5%, at the moment based on draft numbers.
