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New global small-caps fund targets wholesale, retail investors
The multi-boutique asset manager, Warakirri Asset Management, is adding a global small-caps fund to its suite of investment options available to retail and wholesale investors.
“One of the areas we identified last year was global small-caps and we went on a hunt to find a good quality small-cap manager,” Warakirri Asset Management head of managed funds platform, Joe Marassa (pictured), says.
Warakirri has partnered with specialist US and global equities manager ClariVest Asset Management to bring a global small-cap companies fund to the market by the third quarter of calendar 2025. ClariVest is an affiliate of St. Petersburg, Florida-based Raymond James Investment Management, and Warakirri will be the exclusive distribution point for the fund in Australia.
The fund will complement existing boutique managers on the Warakirri platform – Northcap Capital in Australian equities and emerging market equities, Mesirow in US real estate and currency management, and Warakirri Agriculture’s cropping, dairies and diversified agriculture capabilities.
Warakirri has $3.5 billion in funds under management, $700 million of which is on the funds management platform. The funds on its platform are chosen for a range of factors and are differentiated from, but complementary to, its existing product range. They also need to place a similar emphasis on ESG issues to that of Warakirri.
ClariVest senior portfolio manager, Alex Turner, who was in Australia recently, has been with the company since 2008. Many of the other analysts have been with ClariVest since it was formed in 2006.
“It’s a very longtenured team and that’s a big part of our success,” he says. “We have been coming to Australia for a while now and we have managed money for superannuation funds before.”
Most of the analysts at ClariVest began as programmers and the manager’s investment process uses proprietary quantitative tools to cast an initial “wide net” in the search for unexpected opportunities.
“We are focused on recent change that’s being under-appreciated by the market,” Turner says.
He says that humans are hard wired to under-react to recent change and will traditionally put more emphasis on the medium- to long-term history of a company. It is in these spaces ClariVest looks for opportunities.
Those companies selected by the quantitative process are then examined by an analyst who looks at why a recent significant change in a company is being ignored, and the potential risks to a stock. The portfolio traditionally holds between 80 and 160 stocks and has a turnover of less than 80 per cent.
Turner says one of the areas the firm has been examining is Japanese companies that are selling components into AI data centres. As at end of April, Japan has the second-highest weighting in the portfolio, at 13.1 per cent.
“We like to add consistent returns for our clients. Small-caps is a risky sector but over the past five years, we’ve been able to outperform,” Turner says.
The fund, which was established April 2020, has delivered an annualised gross return of 21.01 per cent over the five years to March 31, 2025, compared with the MSCI World Small Index return of 15.1 per cent over the corresponding period.
Marassa says he expects the fund to launch in the next few months under a retail structure with a product disclosure statement. The minimum investment of other boutique funds on the platform is $25,000.
