Peter Brunt: I'm here to tell you about the winner of the Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year award for Global Equities. This year the award went to Jeremy Podger for his work on the Fidelity Global Special Situations fund. Podger has spent over two of his three decades in the industry successfully managing global equity mandates.
He worked at investment houses such as Investec and Threadneedle before joining Fidelity in 2012, when he took over the Fidelity Global Special Situations fund. His approach is best described as core, but he can be pragmatic. And he is happy to tilt the portfolio in line with his top-down views with regards to value in growth and by regional sector within the parameters of the mandate. He has shown an ability to read markets very well over the years. Although this has always been to set a context of the portfolio rather than to drive it's positioning. With stock selection being the main driver of returns on this fund and throughout his career.
Podger has always managed to make highly effective use of the resource available to him. At Threadneedle he had a dedicated global equities team that would undertake its own research and interpret to the Group's regional teams in a global context. At Fidelity, he is not able to direct the research in the same way but he has clearly adapted to the Group's analyst bank set up very quickly.
