Gartmore shines in latest Extel Fund Awards

Gartmore was among the prominent names in this year's Thomson Reuters Extel awards, the leading benchmark for excellence in investment banking.

The 2009 results of this pan-European survey, which were published last Wednesday, draw on the opinions of buy-side firms, brokerage/research houses and Europe's largest quoted companies, and aims to highlight achievement in the buy-side, sell-side and corporate communities.

Based on the votes of brokerage firms, Gartmore was rated fifth of all pan-European fund management firms, while Sacha Sadan, a senior UK equities fund manager at Gartmore, was ranked second of all fund management individuals, ahead of other renowned investment professionals from the likes of Fidelity, Invesco Perpetual and JP Morgan.

Other successes for Gartmore were recorded in surveys for chemicals, food manufacturers, household products & personal care and metals & mining, where the company occupied all four top spots. Gartmore was also ranked first in household products & personal care based on all companies' votes.

Sacha Sadan was ranked first in the household products & personal care category and second in both the food retailer and transport categories for buy-side individuals based on brokerage firm results. He was rated third in metals & mining and household products & personal care based on all votes.

In all, Gartmore or Gartmore personnel occupied top-three slots in 15 instances in the survey's sector-by-sector results.

These results augment Gartmore's track record of previous success in developing and maintaining long-standing and strong relationships with individual companies and the City.

"We are pleased that, even during such a turbulent year as 2008, we have managed to maintain our strong relationships with companies and the sell-side of our business," commented Sacha Sadan.

"Through difficult periods as during any other, we believe it critical that we keep meeting with companies to ensure that we are getting the fundamentals right."

These awards are not the first for Gartmore UK Equities team's this year. In January, Ben Wallace scooped the EuroHedge 2008 Best UK Long/Short Equity Fund award for the AlphaGen Octanis hedge fund.

In response to demand from the retail market for access to a similar strategy, Gartmore launched its UK Absolute Return Fund in April. Like Octanis, the new fund takes strategic and tactical long and short positions in UK companies.