Summer Growth Selection

How did your portfolio perform? 

The Summer Growth Selection (the fund) delivered a return after fees and before tax of 1.60% for the month of February. For the 12 months to the end of February, the fund delivered a return after fees and before tax of 11.27%.

In local currency terms global equities returned 1.29%, with strong performances from emerging markets and Asia generally. Our other equities asset classes also performed strongly over the month as longer term interest rates fell. 

Our Australian and New Zealand equity managers underperformed their benchmarks over the month, whilst our multi manager global equity strategy outperformed. Our cash and fixed interest managers performed in line with their benchmarks.

For details on the Growth Fund's single asset class funds, see the relevant commentary.

We actively manage the fund’s foreign currency exposures and hedge the international fixed interest segment of the fund. The New Zealand dollar fell 0.79% against the US dollar and 2.48% against the Australian dollar.

What happened in the markets you invest in? 

The February reporting season showed domestic recoveries in NZ and Australia continue to progress, whilst US and European growth indicators were also generally positive.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom continued, with material increases in capital expenditure for data centres and supporting power infrastructure announced. The increased capability of the AI models to provide both efficiency gains and spawn competing business models saw performance of stocks exposed to that spend diverge. The builders of infrastructure performed relatively well, whereas many software businesses fell sharply on the prospect of more competition.

The US Supreme Court ruled the first round of trade tariffs as largely illegal, prompting the US government to invoke other legal provisions to keep them in place. Overall, the trend in tariff levels appears to have peaked and may start to fall from here.

What are we thinking about the future? 

The Iranian war is now dominating headlines and short-term market returns. Higher commodity prices and lower tourism spend are the first-round effects. Should the oil price stay high for a prolonged period it could negatively impact on both inflation and growth.

The general economic backdrop in most major economies pre the hostilities were generally solid. Higher than target inflation is the black mark, but growth concerns are likely to dominate central bank concerns, particularly when the additional inflation in their home countries cannot influence a supply shock in the oil market.

The history of military conflicts on financial markets is that impacts are limited, provided the war is contained and doesn’t escalate into a major global conflict. Remaining diversified across both regions and asset classes remains the best way to manage risk, in our opinion.

The Octagon Investment Committee meet in early March and chose to increase the Balanced funds exposure to global equities, funded from lowering our exposure to New Zealand Equities and Listed Property. With the de-rating of some of the highest priced global equities and a very strong international reporting season, the relative valuation of global equities to NZ equities has improved. The NZ reporting season was solid, but upgrades to outer years were modest. Listed Property remains attractively priced and its yield premium to bonds has expanded, however we elected to use some of our overweight to fund the move into global equities.