Global Strategy Fund: December 2022

Summary

• What a tough year 2022 has been. Global financial markets experienced extreme volatility and it was a year that will go down in history books as being one of the most turbulent. All the underlying equity sectors produced negative returns for December, with Utilities being the best sub-sector with a return of -0.5%. Global equities, as measured by the FTSE All-World Total Return Index returned -3.7% for the last month of 2022.
• Value stocks outperformed growth stocks by quite a healthy margin over the past quarter and 12 months.
• Global bonds (as measured by The FTSE WorldBIG Index) had a relatively flat month returning -0.1%.
• The Ashburton Global Strategy Fund priced for the last time in December, returning -0.5% between 30th November 2022 and 28th December 2022. The fund outperformed its SAA that returned -2.6% over the same period.
• The value of having underlying managers with differentiated styles to produce uncorrelated returns have become very important, and we’ve seen the benefits of this coming through in the Ashburton Global Strategy fund over the past year.
• The star performer for the month was the small exposure to China via the Cederberg Greater China Equity Fund that had a stellar return of +8.0%.
• The concentrated equity manager, Epoch and the concentrated equity manager, Mundane posted negative returns for the month, but outperformed the equity benchmark with returns of -2.1% and -3.0% respectively.
• The deep value equity manager, Lyrical ended the month with a return of -5.2%.
• Global bonds had a flat month; and the exposure via the Colchester Global Bond Fund had a positive return of +1.3% for the period. The small exposure to Franklin Templeton also had a good month with a return of +3.5%.
• The Ashburton Global Strategy Fund reflects the macroeconomic house view of Ashburton Investments, and subsequently the Tactical Asset Allocation of the fund was changed in November 2022. The equities exposure was reduced from 65% to 61% and the fund is now at an underweight position to its SAA. The Cash exposure was increased to 4%.