While much ado is made of the science that goes into fund manager research, real assessment puts comparable weight on the art as well according to investment leaders.
While financials and materials dominated trades leading into 2024, the popularity of other sectors like healthcare and information technology followed generational, and even demographic, lines.
Guiding hand of serendipity working for Invesco’s Ashley O’Connor
The serendipity started when a young Ashley O’Connor asked his careers teacher at Yarra Valley Grammar school in eastern Melbourne how he might best marry his strong suit, mathematics, with a broader commerce degree. The careers teacher suggested a commerce degree with a major in actuarial science, advice that O’Connor followed when applying to Melbourne University. Although he found actuarial studies “one-dimensional,” O’Connor did not realise at the time how important it was going to be.
It continued when – as he admits, looking to extend his time at university – he parlayed that course into a post-graduate degree in finance at Melbourne.
Ironically, coming out of university in 2000 and with finance jobs scarce, the best opportunity that O’Connor found was an actuarial job at Towers Perrin in Melbourne. There, some unforeseen serendipity guided his career again.
“I took that opportunity because I wanted to get into professional full-time employment, and actuarial graduate salaries were higher than most other areas. The money was appealing but I never felt like it would be a long-term thing,” he recalls.
“But as it happened, it worked out really well for me because the business unit in Towers Perrin that I was in was importing pension-loss calculations from the UK. There was a mis-selling scandal from 1988 to 1994 in the UK, where people just mis-sold pensions. And they decided everybody should be reimbursed. They were sending cases from the UK Towers Perrin office to Australia, and we were calculating the losses and reimbursements.”
To a lay person, that might not sound like a big break, but it was.
“That work was a great grounding in attention to detail, discipline, and ‘sense checks’ – by which, I mean the ability to look at a set of data and know whether it looks right or wrong,” says O’Connor. “Also, it led to the opportunity to go to England to do the same type of work, on multiples of a normal graduate salary. It was a great opportunity to work in the UK for two years. I had met my first wife at Towers Perrin; we travelled a lot in Europe and it was great.”
Returning to Australia in 2003, O’Connor took six months off to reconnect with family and friends, and get fit. When he started looking for jobs in early 2004, his old friend, serendipity, was waiting.
“An opportunity came up at Frontier Investment Consulting (now Frontier Advisors). I’d never heard of what asset consulting was. But I became an analyst, researching managers, writing reports, doing annual reviews of sectors for clients, annual strategy [and] reviews of asset allocation across the equities and debt space,” O’Connor says.
“When I started, the firm only had about 20 staff, but it had a large client base of rapidly growing super funds and that meant that you really got thrown in at the deep end. I was very lucky that Fiona Trafford-Walker was head of consulting and the business, who is somebody I have the utmost regard for. Even though Fiona was highly experienced, and very highly regarded, she was perfectly comfortable in a client meeting allowing you as the analyst to present a paper, and she would jump in as required. That experience was just so highly valuable.”
Towards the end of a “fantastic” ten years at Frontier, O’Connor had another pivotal meeting when he attended the Launceston Cup race meeting as a guest of a super fund. There he met Marty Franc, now CEO at Invesco Australia.
“It was a great day out. Marty was at BT at the time, and we met. I’ve never had this feeling in my career where I just hit it off so well with someone. I remember thinking, “I’d love to work with this bloke.’ We became very friendly outside of work, too.”
Franc eventually became CEO of Invesco Australia in October 2013. “I went to see him there shortly after he started, not really looking for a job, but we ended up creating a brand-new role — certainly for Invesco, and I haven’t really seen it replicated anywhere else. It was a gap that Marty had seen, for an investment specialist to be the conduit between the local business and sales team and, and the firm’s offshore investment centres, and asset consultants and the market here in Australia.
“It was a new role for Australia, but also a new role for the firm generally. It’s really about determining what strategies we should bring to market in Australia, and why. It’s really being honest about what we’re actually good at in Invesco and what the Australian market wants or needs, and trying to bring that together to use every everybody’s time effectively,” he says. “It’s great, I absolutely love it.”
And in serendipity’s best gift yet, it was Melbourne-based.
“That was the clincher,” laughs O’Connor. “I have two school-aged kids with my ex-wife, and two primary-kids with my wife, and they’re all in Melbourne. Everyone gets on really well, and there was no way I was going to spoil that by moving anywhere or commuting to Sydney,” he says.
