GAM Investment’s Anthony Smouha has won FE fundinfo’s coveted 2022 ‘Alpha Manager of the Year Award’ which celebrates the best performing active fund managers from across the investment industry.
In a year marked by volatility throughout the global markets, Anthony, who manages the GAM Star Credit Opportunities fund, triumphed against stiff competition for the award, which included Wellington’s John Boselli, Comgest’s Franz Weis, Baillie Gifford’s Tom Slater and Liontrust’s Julian Fosh.
A successful evening for both Anthony and GAM, he also won a second Alpha Manager Award in the Sterling Strategic Bond asset class category, beating fund managers from Sanlam, Jupiter, M&G and Nomura.
“There’s no question that it has been a very testing two years for the investment industry. As we have moved from a Covid economy to a period of high interest rates and inflation, one set of challenging circumstances has been replaced by another and again, fund managers are coming under enormous amounts of pressure to demonstrate their value. But throughout this, Anthony Smouha has guided his GAM fund through these difficult times and has consistently outperformed his sector and index benchmarks. A very worthy winner in a very competitive field, Anthony joins the most esteemed names within the industry, including last year’s winner Douglas Brodie and 2020’s joint winners Julian Fosh and Anthony Cross.”
Charles Younes, Research Manager, FE Investments
In total, twelve Alpha Manager awards were conferred at the ceremony, held at Banking Hall, in the heart of the City of London and organised by leading global fund data and technology company FE fundinfo. There were joint winners in the ‘Best New Alpha Manager’ category, with Premier Miton’s Carlos Moreno and Thomas Brown winning the accolade, for the performance of their European Sustainable Leaders and European Opportunities funds, while Mark Rodgers and Charles Montanaro won in the newly-created ‘Best Responsible/Sustainable’ category.
Across the different asset classes and territories, there were Alpha Manager wins for Ben Wallace and Luke Newman from Janus Henderson in the Absolute Return category, Fidelity’s Anthony Srom in the Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) & GEM category, the entire Comgest team (Franz Weis, Arnaud Cosserat, Alistair Wittet, Eva Fornadi, Laurent Dobler) in Europe (ex-UK), Fundsmith’s Terry Smith in the Global category, Sophia Li from FSSA in Japan, Richard Woolnough from M&G in the Sterling Fixed Income category, Slater’s Mark Slater in the UK Equities category and Alliance Bernstein’s James Tierney in the US Equities category.
The winners of FE fundinfo’s Alpha Manager Awards are determined by narrowing down the total list of FE fundinfo Alpha-rated managers to a shortlist of the highest-scoring managers per category. Once the shortlist has been refined, FE fundinfo’s panel apply a qualitative analysis overlay to select the eventual winners.