While the investment house is best known for its UK equity range – the Artemis Income and Special Situations funds have more than £5bn AUM between them – co-founder and senior partner Mark Tyndall says it has been successful in broadening its range to reflect the evolving appetite of a new generation of UK investors. "Retail investors and their advisers are making a good fist of a very bad investment environment," he said. "Our funds have been very biased towards the UK but people are rightly starting to look further afield and diversify their exposure. I don’t think investors will come back and buy the UK market like they used to."
"We’ve been very cautious about launching new funds and have continued to focus on what we do best in the UK equity space, but we’ve recognised we need to participate in areas with an international focus. While these funds are only young, they are doing very well indeed."
Artemis Strategic Assets is the most mature of the recent offerings. Launched in May 2009, the £869m fund will be celebrating its third anniversary soon, an important milestone because many IFAs won't recommend a fund any younger than that.
Headed up by William Littlewood, data from FE Analytics shows that the fund has returned 34.28 per cent since inception, compared with 33.13 per cent from its Flexible Investment sector.
Performance of fund since launch vs sector
Source: FE Analytics
The Global Income fund has returned 19.60 per cent since it was launched in July 2010. The figures put it comfortably in the second quartile of the new Global Equity Income sector.
While it is perhaps too early to judge the performance of the Global Energy and Global Select funds, they are both above their respective benchmarks at this early stage.
"Artemis is an aggregation of fund managers with their own unique approaches," explained Tyndall. "The best fund managers have a recognisable and methodical approach and communicate it effectively to investors."
"It’s hard enough for fund managers to get the timing right on their investment and they can make a decision and get the deal finished in a matter of hours while IFAs only get to see their clients once or twice a year and then have to allow them to go away and think about recommendations."
"For this reason, we try to offer funds with a consistent and predictable approach so investors don’t have to worry about the strategy as markets fluctuate."
"One of our strengths is that IFAs might tell you that they don’t like our funds at a given moment in the market but they understand what they do and what markets they are suited to."