July Forum will include speakers from Axa and Investec
Speakers at this year's Investment Week July Markets Forum will include Axa Framlington's Mark Tinker, Investec's commodities specialist Bradley George and Jupiter's Alex Darwall.
The event will be held on the day of the Fund Manager of the Year Awards, 10 July, with this year's Forum in the Radisson Edwardian Mayfair Hotel in London.
Investment Week has introduced several additional categories for this year's awards, recognising the importance of global equities and complexity of overseas debt.
The former asset allocation category is split into four, with a standalone awards for global equities plus active, balanced and cautious portfolios.
Elsewhere, we have also split the former Gilt and Global Bond category into individual global and specialist debt awards.
Finally, there will be two emerging market awards this year, reflecting the region's key role in the global economy.
One award will focus on general emerging market products covering the whole and the second on more specialist single country offerings.
The 13th annual awards ceremony will see managers recognised in 17 different individual categories plus two group awards and a lifetime achievement.
As before, the first stage of the judging process involves running a quants screen across the entire fund universe, using statistics provided by Morningstar up to 31 March 2008.
Looking at each fund's percentile ranking within its own sector over each of the three discrete years, the screen gives a 20% weighting to the percentile ranking achieved during the 12 months to 31 March 2006, 30% to the period to 31 March 2007 and 40% to the year to 31 March 2008.
In addition a 10% weighting is given to the fund's sortino ratio, using a basic cash proxy as the risk-free rate.
These four separate figures are added up to give a single number, with the highest possible score being 100.
