Royal London Asset Management’s Eric Holt took the highly coveted FE Alpha Manager of the Year Award at last night’s FE Alpha Manager of the Year Awards. 
Holt (pictured) – who manages the Royal London Sterling Extra Yield Bond and Royal London Ethical Bond funds – was also named the Best Strategic Bond Alpha Manager, in a good night for Royal London.
Colleague Mike Fox – who oversees the Royal London Sustainable Leaders Trust, Royal London Sustainable Worldwide Leaders Trust and Royal London Sustainable Diversified Trust – was named Best UK Equities Alpha Manager and also took the Best Mixed Assets Alpha Manager award.
Lindsell Train and BlackRock also fared well picking up two awards each.
Michael Lindsell and Nick Train were named joint Best Global Equities Alpha Manager, while Lindsell picked up the Best Japanese Equities Alpha Manager award.
The £7.7bn Lindsell Train Global Equity fund is up by 294.4 per cent to last month-end since launching in March 2011. Meanwhile, the £299m Lindsell Train Japanese Equity fund was up by 253.9 per cent over the 10 years to last month-end.
Gordon Fraser – manager of the £237.2m BlackRock Emerging Markets fund – was named Best Global Emerging Markets Alpha Manager, while colleague Ben Edwards – who oversees the £953.5m BlackRock Corporate Bond fund – took home the Best Sterling Fixed Income Alpha Manager award.
The Best New Alpha Manager was presented to the Comgest European team – made up of Laurent Dobler, Franz Weis & Arnaud Cosserat – the managers behind the €2.6bn Comgest Growth Europe fund.
Source: FE
Elsewhere, Jupiter’s Alexander Darwall – manager of the £5.4bn Jupiter European fund – was recognised as Best European Equities Alpha Manager, Larry J Puglia from T. Rowe Price – sole manager of the $745.8m T. Rowe Price US Blue Chip Equity fund – won Best US Equities Alpha Manager and Stephen Moore of Artemis – who oversees the £503.6m Artemis US Absolute Return strategy – was named Best Absolute Return Alpha Manager.
In total 53 managers from 37 fund groups were shortlisted across 12 award categories recognising top performance across a range of asset classes.
The shortlist was drawn from the 200 fund managers awarded an FE Alpha Manager rating at the 2019 rebalance. The rating recognises a manager’s ability to create risk-adjusted alpha, outperformance in both rising and falling markets, and those who consistently beat their sector peers.
Shortlisted managers were determined by identifying the highest scoring FE Alpha Managers from the rebalance with a mix of quantitative and qualitative assessment used to pick the winners.
Peter Little, chief executive at FE, said: “The FE Alpha Manager awards are a celebration of the industry’s best-rated fund managers.
“They are recognition of a manager’s ability to create risk-adjusted alpha, outperformance in both rising and falling markets and of those who consistently beat their sector peers.”
Source: FE
Charles Younes, research manager at FE Invest, said: “This year’s award winners have combined consistent performance throughout their career with phenomenal outperformance over the past year in their respective categories.
“This is an incredible achievement in the face of unpredictable markets and increased volatility in 2018.”
He added: “The winners are determined by narrowing down the FE Alpha-rated managers to a list of the highest-scoring managers per category. Once we had a refined list, our panel applied a qualitative overlay to select the brightest stars.”