South African born and educated Greg Kuhnert, portfolio manager of the Investec Asia ex Japan Fund, has been named Citywire's European fund manager of the year. He has achieved this honour by gaining the best risk/return ratio of any fund manager across the continent. This means he has made more money for every percent of risk taken than any other fund manager in Europe.

Citywire, a leading specialist publishing house and database provider, searches across Europe for every fund manager with a three-year track record. Over the three years to the end of 2007, the period over which the top 100 list was calculated, Kuhnert achieved a return of 170 percent in dollar terms before charges, while the average manager delivered 109 percent.

Kuhnert graduated from the University of Witwatersrand with a B Com in accountancy and became a chartered accountant in 1997. Finding life as an accountant too dull, he joined Investec Asset Management in 1999 and moved to the London office in 2000, where he began working as an analyst on Asian and global equities.

Kuhnert is a bottom-up fundamental investor and uses Investec’s proprietary 4Factorä approach in his stock selection. His portfolio typically consists of 70 to 90 shares and he believes the 4Factorä approach helps give him a competitive advantage over other managers. He uses the process to monitor 850 companies in Asia that have a market cap of more than $500-million. The process allocates a score to each stock and each share that scores highly becomes a potential investment and is then individually analysed.

"The 4Factorä approach is a way of escaping the distractions of market noise, before making the final decisions on the stocks that the system has singled out. There is a lot of noise in Asia. People are always spinning really good stories about factors in Asia. The factors out there are exciting, but what our process does is force us to focus on fundamentals. We're not letting to stories cloud our judgement," he says.

Commenting on the accolade, Hendrik du Toit, CEO of Investec Asset Management, said: "Greg embodies the ideals we have for Investec Asset Management as a business; to build a world-class international investment firm, proud of its South African roots. We are about giving talented people the freedom to create their own success. From joining our business on the finance side, Greg has single-mindedly pursued excellence. We are thrilled with his achievement, which is also an endorsement of the very successful 4Factorä process developed by Investec Asset Management."

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