While many old-school investment houses continue to limit the scope of their investment research and opportunities by keeping their best thinkers within separate silos, Platypus has gone a different direction. We believe in sharing all our investment insights, research and ideas across ALL our analysts. Regardless of what sector they’re responsible for. This tends to allow better outcomes for our clients. 

We‘ve invested in an incredibly diverse team of analysts from all manner of financial backgrounds. (Because a team of regular ‘equities guys’ would only deliver our clients regular returns.) While their backgrounds may differ, what unites them is an unbridled passion for investing and a desire – no, it’s more of a need – to uncover tremendous investment ideas and opportunities for our clients that aim to outperform the ordinary. 

Our qualitative analysts work hand-in-hand with quantitative experts to ensure that everyone is armed with as much knowledge as possible before every major investment decision is made. Egos are not welcome during these discussions. Just facts, research, data and some of Australia’s best investment thinking. And while this approach may be very unusual within our industry, it tends to lead to extraordinary results¹ for our clients. So we won’t be changing our methods any time soon. 

Every analyst at Platypus is encouraged to contribute ideas and knowledge on a daily basis. While most of this thinking doesn’t change the make-up of our funds, it nearly always sparks off further discussion,  investigation and often further interrogation. It’s all part of our ‘Active Fund Management’ and it’s a major reason why Platypus outperforms the ordinary for our clients¹.

In investment terms, we are constantly chasing positive alpha. The market return is referred to as beta: an ordinary, everyday type of return. Any return above or below the market return is considered alpha. And it’s the positive alpha we’re chasing for our clients.

Many competitors still adopt a traditional ‘set-and-forget’ approach with their funds. But not Platypus. Never.

As active fund managers, we constantly interrogate our funds and every stock held within them. While we never make knee-jerk reactions about our investments, we vigilantly watch them every single day to make sure they are living up to our high expectations. While this takes a hell of a lot of work, it’s just another reason we’ve been outperforming the market for over two decades.¹

Even when we’re doing well – extremely well – the whole investment team relentlessly research how to do even better for our clients. Our analytics team love this approach as they are driven by the need to break their own ‘records’. Striving for the best returns then better those results yet again.

Despite our generating significant returns for our clients over the past 20 years¹, you’ll never hear us talking about them around the office. Because while we’re happy to exploit market conditions to the advantage of our clients, we are always ruthlessly interrogating the market for any signs of when and where the next downside will occur. So regardless of what the market is doing at any given time, we can confidently look straight into the eyes of each and every client and say, “We’re doing our very best for you” without ever flinching. 

While the PR departments of Australia’s publicly listed companies continue to pump out press releases and spin, it’s fair to say that we treat all these with a healthy amount of skepticism. Indeed, for every company we invest in – via the Platypus Australian Equities Fund – we will prosecute any announcement or news article regarding that company on behalf of our clients to make sure it all adds up. And if it doesn’t, we contact the relevant directors for an urgent meeting in order to uncover the truth. Only after this investigation do we make a decision on whether to hold or sell their stock. We owe it to our clients to advocate for them in all manner of ways, including attending every shareholder meeting too.