Manager Research
all members of our manager research team have over ten years of investment experience.
Laurium announced that the Laurium Equity Prescient fund will merge with the newly launched Nedgroup Investments SA Equity Fund. They have received confirmation to move ahead with the balloting process to get approval from investors. The balloting letters will be distributed to investors on the 7th of December. Nedgroup also plans to amalgamate the Nedgroup Investments Growth fund into the merged SA Equity fund shortly afterwards.
Nedgroup recently awarded the mandate of the Growth fund to Laurium, following the closure of Electus Fund Managers in June 2020. We wrote about this here. Electus co-founder, Neil Brown, had managed the fund through its various iterations since 2001. The fund had a midcap bias within a general equity mandate, which caused it to underperform significantly during the COVID crisis. The launch of the SA-only Nedgroup Investments SA Equity fund is a way to distance the mandate from the poor track-record of the Growth fund, and also to create distinction from the Nedgroup Investments Rainmaker fund, which recently started including offshore.
We wouldn’t expect any changes to the way that the Laurium fund is managed, although we would expect it to gain a bit more traction with investors following the distribution agreement with Nedgroup. We will provide an update once the balloting process has been concluded, but this doesn’t affect the rating on the fund at this stage.
Summary of Laurium Capital Ratings
| FUND |
FUNDHOUSE RATING |
| Laurium Equity Prescient Fund | Tier 2 |
| Laurium Flexible Prescient Fund | Tier 2 |
Laurium Equity Prescient Fund to merge with Nedgroup SA Equity Fund
7 Dec 2020