Normality returns

In the seven years since the global financial crisis some unit trust managers, such as Allan Gray and Coronation, have grown into proverbial whales.

But, as Coronation’s head of personal investments, Pieter Koekemoer, concedes, there is now a normalisation of the market.

“Along with Allan Gray, Investec, Nedgroup, Foord and Prudential we account for more than half of industry assets, excluding money market. But over the past two to three years at least 25 new direct fund managers have emerged and there has been some deconsolidation since early 2015.”

PSG Asset Management CE Anet Ahern says that at least 40% of the flows went to boutique shops and discretionary investment managers.

Just 17% went to the usual crop of large firms.

PSG, which lies somewhere in the middle, attracted R1.4bn.

Over the past year more than a third of flows, or R23.6bn, has gone into Boutique Collective Investments (BCI), which hosts boutique managers, financial advisers and discretionary fund managers and has nearly 280 funds. BCI head Robert Walton says some of the flow can be accounted for by conversions of clients from the MMI-controlled MetCI management company (which Walton used to run) into BCI, but only R3bn moved over the past year.

Walton says the rest is