Armed with vastly improved performance figures, Tyndall has started selling itself to asset consultants again and expects to win some lucrative equity mandates this year.
The high conviction value manager, which is owned by Royal & SunAlliance, is now rebuilding its profile following a post-Asian crisis performance slump that took it off most asset consultants’ radar screens.
“We had to go back to basics and look at what needed to be revitalised,” says Michael Good, CEO of Tyndall. “We had to get our performance back. That takes a couple of years. It’s not a quick process, but we are comfortable with what we have now.”
He attributes Tyndall’s poor performance between 1997 and 1999 to its young and inexperienced equities team and its lack of explicit risk controls. Also, market conditions did not favour value managers.
In October 1999, however, Tyndall brought in Bob Van Munster as head of equity research. A review of the group’s operations followed which resulted in several changes being made in March 2000, including the addition of more experienced people to the investment team and improved risk controls.
However, Van Munster stresses that no alterations have been made to Tyndall’s basic style and investment philosophy, although these continue to be refined and improved.
“We’ve really stuck to our knitting,” he says. “We’ve always been steeped in a value philosophy because we believe that over the long-term, it adds outperformance.”
Tyndall’s changes certainly appear to be paying off. InTech’s growth performance survey lists Tyndall as the second best manager for the first six months of the current financial year, a period in which most managers have produced negative returns. Tyndall’s gain of 2.4 per cent for the period is second only to Maple-Brown Abbott’s 2.8 per cent.
Van Munster expects Tyndall to now be used as a complimentary manager by super funds which use several managers, and by “those who want to be style neutral and not have a heavy exposure to index stocks”.
