SIM General Equity Fund Delivers Consistently Superior Performance

The SIM General Equity Fund is the shop window into SIM’s pragmatic value investment approach and so we are pleased the Fund is delivering on our commitment to investors: to generate consistent outperformance in the long-term.

It’s no mean achievement in an environment where value fund managers are having a tough time because investors have been willing to pay over the odds for certainty rather than buying into future potential.

Notwithstanding this, it is clear from the graph below that for all time periods over the past decade, the Fund has delivered performance in the top half of its category and is, in fact, a top quartile performer over five, seven and ten years.

It’s important to remember, however, that there will be times, like now, when value managers underperform other investment styles and possibly the market itself. As you can see in the chart below, a value style has been the stand out winner by a wide margin during the entire period but over the last couple of years the tide has turned in favour of momentum and value has lost ground.

Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that the cumulative performance of the SIM General Equity Fund began to decline from 2011 and came under renewed pressure in 2012.

However, even though value has outperformed, it remains the stand out winner. As such, we are committed to delivering long-term outperformance by sticking to our pragmatic value investment philosophy and are confident that the fundamentals that drive the intrinsic valuations of businesses should prevail. Thus we expect value-based investment portfolios, like the SIM General Equity Fund, to outperform over the long term thanks to the investment decisions that we have made recently.