Overview
Hunter Hall Investment Management is Australia’s largest dedicated ethical investment manager. It is a ‘boutique’ fund manager that was established in 1993 and is headed by Peter Hall – a manager with 26 years experience. The aim is to create wealth for investors over time through careful and responsible investment in undervalued companies.
Hunter Hall’s objective is to provide investors with superior returns over the medium to long term by investing in high quality stocks that are perceived to be undervalued. These are often undiscovered, under researched and ‘out of favour’ companies.
Hunter Hall is a fundamental bottom-up, benchmark-unaware, value manager. The bottom up style means that the investment decisions start at the company level, looking at the industry sectors, the region and then overlying economic issues. A benchmark unaware approach allows a manager to pick stocks that are not constrained to benchmark weightings. This allows the manager to move into markets that present the best opportunities rather than having a forced allocation to a region or sector with less potential growth. A value manager looks to buy stocks that are below fair value. Buying stocks at a discount to their intrinsic or fair value can provide the manager with substantial upside if this value is subsequently realised by the market. At the same time, downside risk is reduced by having purchased the stock below intrinsic value.
Hunter Hall has recently changed from a single portfolio manager approach to a multi-portfolio manager basis and, although each manager employs a value approach, this adds a level of diversification in manager style to the portfolio. The focus on achieving a minimum required return from each stock in the portfolio will result in high cash holdings when there are few attractive opportunities.
Ethical Investment Policy
Hunter Hall is committed to the concept of responsible investing and applies an Ethical Investment Policy to all products. The Ethical Investment Policy of its funds involves applying a negative screen to potential investments which seeks to avoid investment in companies that derive operating revenues from direct and material business involvement in the manufacture or sale of weapons and weapons components, tobacco manufacture, gambling outlets or systems, intensive animal farming, animal testing for cosmetics, activities that give rise to human rights violations, un-remediated destruction of the environment and uranium mining and nuclear reactors.
In October 2007 Hunter Hall launched its first positively screened investment fund, the Hunter Hall Global Deep Green Trust (GDG), which in addition to applying the screen above, will focus investment in enterprises which are deemed to make a positive impact on the wellbeing of people, animals and the environment. Furthermore, the GDG will not invest in any company domiciled in any country involved in commercial whaling.
