FinansWatch | "AuAg ramps up institutional initiative"

FinansWatch reports on AuAg's move towards institutional investors, and on the recruitment of Petter Alberts from EQT as portfolio manager. The mining sector has become hard for investors to ignore, while expertise in the sector remains scarce. That is the gap AuAg fills, with an expertise built over seven years in the sector.

The move follows a period of rapid growth for the fund manager, with the strongest growth of all coming in Norway.

Valuable insights:

• Metals and mining sit apart from the rest of an equity portfolio. The sector is driven by metal prices and project economics rather than by the earnings cycle that moves the broad market, which is why allocators look at it for diversification rather than as more of the same risk.
• Retail and institutional money ask different questions of the same fund. A private saver looks at the exposure itself; an allocator looks at how it behaves against everything else they own, and at capacity and liquidity. Building for the second group is a different job from distributing to the first.