Treasury boutiques gain inflows

16-Jul-2009

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Publication:  Financial Standard Online
Date:  5 June 2009

Treasury boutiques gain inflows
Friday, 5 June 2009 12:05pm
Treasury Asia Asset Management (TAAM), RARE Infrastructure and Orion Asset Management have received inflows in the past month after a seven-month dry spell, suggesting some instos are dripfeeding capital back into boutiques.

"Clients were frozen for six or seven months, but in January and February we started to have conversations like ‘can you guys give us some scenarios?' So they were coming up for air and we've started to see allocations in the past month or so," said Mark Burgess, managing director at boutique incubator Treasury Group.

This fund movement reflects an attitude from both retail and institutional investors to start investing in the market and ride what they perceive as a sustained upswing, especially across Asian equities, said Burgess.

"People are looking at Asia and someone that will participate on the upside and [Peter Sartori, chief investment officer at TAAM] fits that, he's had a lot of new client attention recently, we'll just have to see what he wins," he said.

This news comes during a tough period for boutique investment managers as some investors move to larger institutional fund managers to provide more security.

Aside from those three boutiques, Treasury Group has assisted in the development of Investors Mutual Limited (IML), Global Value Investors, Cannae Capital Partners and Premium Investors Limited.

Early last year, IML suffered from a ratings downgrade from at least one rating's firm on the back of concerns around the boutique's ability to retain high quality investment staff.

Since then IML overhauled its investment team's equity package to retain a consistent team of analysts and Burgess said the IML business has "stabilised" and performed well, relatively, in the past couple of months.
Meanwhile, Global Value Investors continues to push into the institutional market and one of the firm's latest projects; Cannae Capital Partners, an Australian and New Zealand equities investor, is still developing.

"During the bull market I think people got used to boutiques taking off quickly, but really it takes a period of time for it to take off and Cannae is still in that cycle," he said.

Michael Hobbs