Boutique global equities investment manager Antipodes Partners is expecting to capture SMSF investors for its newly listed active exchange-traded fund (ETF), or exchange-quoted managed fund (EQMF), off strong support for its global equity strategy.
The Antipodes Global Shares (Quoted Managed Fund) was listed and commenced trading on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) yesterday.
It enables retail investors, including SMSFs, to more easily access Antipodes’ capabilities through an open-ended ASX-listed investment.
The EQMF uses the same highly rated investment strategy as used in the Antipodes Global Fund – Long, and is typically exposed to 30 to 60 attractively priced companies listed around the world.
“Anecdotally, SMSFs have a much higher tendency to invest in listed investments so this will obviously have appeal to those people who’d be interested in Antipodes but haven’t been able to access it because they don’t want to invest in an unlisted fund,” Pinnacle Investment Management director Matt Dell told selfmanagedsuper.
“It’s a challenge to access the non-advised SMSF market and no one really knows how big that is, but we know we have a lot of SMSF investors because a lot of them come to us direct to our funds, they don’t go through the platforms – a lot of them do, but also a lot of them don’t.
“For our SMSF clients, there’s overwhelmingly an adviser attached to those applications because we capture that information.
“Having said that, we think, as a house, we think direct, unadvised SMSFs are going to become a bigger part of this retail market and we do have a strategy at Pinnacle for that; it’s something we’ve been working on for a few years now.”
At an Antipodes Partners media lunch in Sydney today, managing director Andrew Findlay highlighted the secular shift occurring in the market where investors are moving from unlisted to listed investments.
“Why is that? I’m positive that it has a lot to do with ease of use, simplicity, transparency, convenience, cost, et cetera,” Findlay said.
“And if you believe that’s not a short-term fad but rather a long-term trend or a real structural shift or secular change in the way in which people invest, we came to the decision that we had to make our strategies available in that format because it is going to grow.
“We know that others have issued in this active ETF space that haven’t done well. My response is that a lot of those issuers didn’t necessarily have that underlying momentum and demand for their offerings, so a lot of investors wouldn’t just buy the structure if they’re not interested in the strategy.
“We, as a business, are confident that we have broad-based momentum and support for our strategies, and we’re capturing a bigger share of the market as we offer it in a different format.”
Antipodes is a boutique manager under Pinnacle Investment Management.
