The Directors of Aspiring are significant investors in the Fund on the same basis as other unit holders. This commitment is for the lifetime of the Fund. Having our own 'skin in the game' is the best comfort and assurance we can give our co-investors that we will manage their investments prudently.
Our combined experience is in Australasian and Global equity markets. We expect a large portion of equity investments to be based in the New Zealand and Australian sharemarkets as the imputation regime in New Zealand and tax treatment in Australasia confers advantages over other markets. Despite this, the Fund will invest globally where we deem returns to be favourable and where we see strong benefits for wider diversification in quality offshore businesses.
Avoiding large losses is a prerequisite to achieving positive absolute returns. The ability to diversify the Fund’s investments to include cash or other low risk instruments is necessary to achieve that. For this reason we have adopted a very broad investment mandate which will allow us to invest in other markets or currencies and to hedge existing equity or currency exposures by the use of options or derivatives. We expect there will be long periods where we use this flexibility sparingly, if at all, but the ability to do so is vital to cope with event-driven crises and to pursue our objective of producing absolute rather than relative outperformance.
The majority of the Fund's investments will be in listed stocks as liquidity and information flows are strongest in this category. From time to time we may invest in unlisted companies but in aggregate this is unlikely to be significant in percentage terms.
Any investment opportunities identified by the directors will first and foremost be for the benefit of the Fund. This means the Fund will always have priority on the acquisition and disposal of any assets. This does not mean the directors cannot hold or purchase other assets but that in all cases the Fund will come first.
Our main focus is achieving the highest possible returns for our unit holders. In times when these returns are diminished by market trends, our focus will be on avoiding real negative returns.
To implement this strategy effectively requires access to company management, customers and competitors. It also requires access to deal flow through good relationships with key market participants, a decision making process which enables a quick response to opportunities and the experience to be able to process the available information in a way which ensures that the correct decisions are made. Our past performance and experience suggest that we have the skill set to do this successfully. We do not regard ourselves as specialist small cap investors although that is a market segment where we have frequently found some of our best opportunities.
We do not have a specific growth or value focus. We have lived through periods when we believed the market was paying an excessive premium for growth and other periods when risk aversion reached such levels those companies with secure growth opportunities were genuinely cheap.
Focusing on long run absolute returns means we will often invest in stocks which do not have widespread coverage from broker or institutional analysts. This means that, at any one time, the portfolio is likely to have several positions with limited liquidity and that the portfolio's performance will have little correlation on a day to day basis with equity indices.
We do not specifically concentrate the portfolio into a small number of holdings and it is unlikely that any individual holding would be in excess of 10% of the portfolio. In most instances we intend to be passive investors but we take our responsibilities as investors seriously and we will be pro-active lobbyists when we believe a company's board or management are not acting in the best interests of shareholders.
