News
Mirzam Crests the Horizon
by Nicola Jenvey: Freelance Journalist
EIGHT months after launching on to the US equities market, the Mirzam Capital Appreciation Fund has secured a position in the top one percentile of the All Capital sector and is poised to achieve the milestone for having $500m under management within five years.
Mirzam Asset Management president Clifford Morris says the fund has shown a 9.8% positive return since launching in August, despite an environment where the Standard & Poor 500 benchmark was a negative 5% loss over the period.
This accomplishment had garnered the fund exposure on US national television.
Morris acknowledged the initial uptake for the fund was slow as it competed against more than 35000 other equity funds. Yet, in reaching the key six-month hurdle, the fund, which currently has around $2m under management, was attracting increasing interest from institutional investors as it showed its mettle.
The 12-month milestone would be the next key level at which the fund attracted interest and he remained confident of reaching the $500m mark for capital under management by 2012.
The fund was established for US investors seeking to shun equity investments that relied on stock-based and share option compensation for the directorship. Morris says the company investment principle was founded on the belief that these compensation plans were often nothing more than legalised front-running, insider-trading and stock-watering wrapped up in one.
In many cases this philosophy opposed the US Securities and Exchange Commissions guidelines that companies pay share options rather than remuneration to its directors as Mirzam believed the practice was detrimental to the shareholders.
As a point of differentiation, Mirzam allocated capital to companies where it believes management placed the interests of shareholders beyond those of the directors.
Management strives to ensure that its investors will not be exposed to companies that have implemented destructive stock-based compensation plans, stomach-churning executive compensation packages or that sell stock to employees at a deep discount to bring in more cash than selling products or services to the customers, Morris says.
In this vein, Mirzam Capital Appreciation Fund portfolio manager and Bastiat Capital president Albert Meyer benefited from an open mandate across sectors and geography when identifying potential share investments for the fund.
Meyer is a highly respected, award-winning investment analyst credited with being one of the early critics of the questionable accounting practices of Tyco, Enron and other corporations long before it became popular to do so.
He has been regularly quoted in leading US business and financial media including The Wall Street Journal. Bastiat Capital is a registered investment advisory company that manages investment accounts for numerous high net-worth individuals.
Morris says in bringing the Mirzam Capital Appreciation Fund to the market, Mirzam Asset Management based in Tequesta, Florida, has brought to American investors a mutual fund that provides both a growth opportunity and an investment philosophy built on the principle of intelligent scepticism.
Our policy is not to blindly accept financial and other information disseminated by the management of companies in which we are considering investing. Rather, we follow a very strict regimen of due diligence and intensive examination of a wide range of data on each and every firm that interests us, he says.
Journalist: Nicola Jenvey
For further information go to www.mirzam.org
Return to News Article List
|
|