Industry super fund Asset Super has terminated a $30 million mandate of AllianceBernstein, which was invested in the Bernstein Global Value Fund.
Asset Super appointed Dimensional Fund Advisors as a new adviser to the super fund and re-invested 45 per cent, or $13.5 million, of the $30 million previously invested with AllianceBernstein in the Dimensional Emerging Markets Trust.
The industry fund invested the rest of the money in the Schroders QEP Value Fund.
Asset Super made the changes based on the advice of its asset consultant, Mercer.
"AllianceBernstein was on a watch for some time, because they had some performance and personnel changes," Asset Super chief executive John Paul said.
"Mercer got to a stage where they said, 'Well, we have gone from it being under a watching situation to we think you should sell'. From that we decided to push the money into a couple of other directions," he said.
The new investment in the Dimensional fund has pushed the overall exposure of Asset Super to emerging markets from under 10 per cent to 15 per cent, Paul said.
"[Mercer] liked Dimensional, but they didn't want us to put the money from AllianceBernstein entirely into Dimensional," Paul said.
"They thought we needed to do a little bit of rebalancing in the international portfolios and hence we put some with Schroders, who have done a good job for us, and took on Dimensional as a replacement for AllianceBernstein basically," he said.
Asset Super also invested $30 million in the BNP Paribas-backed infrastructure manager Antin Infrastructure Partners, which will be part of its alternative asset holdings.
The super fund also made changes to its hedging strategy and introduced a derivatives overlay managed by Tactical Global Management.
"Previously, we used a combination of unhedged and hedged investments, but we have gone totally unhedged in our international space and then we use the overlay on top of those investments to manage the currency exposure," Paul said.
As a result of the changes, the hedging ratio on the international equities portfolio dropped from 40 to 35 per cent.
Multi-industry fund Asset Super had $1.4 billion in funds under management as at the end of last year and has about 85,000 members.
