Franklin Templeton, Threadneedle and Investec all to have speakers at the Markets Forum
Managers including Peter Langerman from Franklin Templeton, Cormac Weldon from Threadneedle and Philip Whittome from Investec will speak at this year's July Markets Forum, held before the 2007 Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year awards.
Langerman will cover investing with a margin of safety, detailing how pursuit of value can deliver consistent growth and lower relative volatility over the long-term.
The July Markets Forum event will be held this year in the Radisson Edwardian Mayfair in London and also features BlackRock bond manager Daniel McKernan, JP Morgan's Ian Henderson and Old Mutual's Stephen Snowden.
Following the forum, the 12th annual awards ceremony will also see managers recognised in 12 different individual categories.
Five of the industry's smaller players are contesting the specialist group of the year, with Rensburg, Dalton Strategic Partners, SVM, JO Hambro Capital Management fighting it out with 2006 winner Neptune.
While groups nominated in the global category have to run a fund in all the major regions and asset classes, the specialist award is designed to recognise excellence among the industry's many boutiques and smaller companies.
Fighting out the global group award are Standard Life Investments, Old Mutual, Jupiter, Invesco Perpetual, New Star and M&G.
As in previous years, the main panel consists of fund of funds managers Bambos Hambi of Gartmore, Gary Potter and Robert Burdett, John Chatfeild-Roberts of Jupiter and John Husselbee of North, plus Investment Week editor James Smith and Incisive Media's group editorial director Lawrence Gosling.
The first stage of the judging process involves running a quants screen across the entire UK unit trust and Oeic universe, using statistics provided by Morningstar up to 31 March 2007. All figures are bid to bid with net income reinvested at ex-dividend, not payment date.
Looking at each fund's percentile ranking within its own IMA sector over each of the three discrete years to 31 March, the screen gives a 20% weighting to the percentile ranking achieved during the 12 months to 31 March 2005, 30% to the period to 31 March 2006 and 40% to the year to 31 March 2007.
In addition a 10% weighting is given to the fund's three-year information ratio. This is the annualised relative return of the fund against its benchmark divided by the annualised tracking error, a measure of relative risk.
These four separate figures are added up to give a single number, with the highest possible score being 100. Using this database, the panel then strips out any fund with less than £15m of assets as of 31 March 2007 or was not in the top half of its IMA peer group over the 12 months to the same date.
On the group category, to be eligible for Global Group of the Year, a fund house has to have at least one UK Equity, one European, one Asia or Japan fund, one North America and one bond fund. The process takes the quants scores for each fund in a group's range with assets above £15m and divides it by the number of eligible funds to come up with an overall quants figure. The Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year Awards will be held at the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday 5 July.
