Time for active management

Published on Friday 18 January 2008 20:02

THE Scotsman's IFA of the Year competition provides a great showcase for the country's top-performing independent financial advisers (IFAs) who can demonstrate an invaluable service and expertise to investors involved with stock markets.

Artemis, as a dedicated active investment management house, is delighted to be a sponsor of the competition. Since it's inception ten years ago, Artemis has grown rapidly by offering a no-frills active management to retail and institutional investors. It now manages an asset base of more than 16.5 billion.

Artemis appreciates and supports the role that an IFA is able to offer investors. They take the time to get to know their clients' individual financial circumstances, tax positions and attitudes to risk.

With the forecast for 2008 looking changeable, the need for IFAs assertively to ensure clients' portfolios remain in line with market opportunities is imperative. Investors may also benefit from active fund managers exploiting investment opportunities. Despite many high street companies having recently seen meaningful downgrades on their share values, Artemis regards 2008 as a year of opportunity. Liquidity issues that dominated much of the market in 2007 are likely to continue into 2008.

This will provide good opportunities in certain sectors. Property, retailers, housebuilding and banks and financial sectors are of particular interest. Many good companies have been re-rated and tarnished by the action of a few under-performing companies and negative sentiment.

Individually their fundamentals are sound and share prices are largely heavily discounted – providing great opportunities for active fund managers. During the recent gloom, directors of many of these companies have actually been buying their own shares. With interest rates set to fall, this should improve the outlook for these sectors.

With a year of opportunity ahead, we wish all the entrants well in this year's Scotsman's IFA of the Year competition.

&#149 Mark Tyndall is chief executive officer of Artemis Fund Managers.