Dana Love
Dana Love has resigned from Invesco Trimark Ltd., the latest in the parade of portfolio managers to leave the mutual fund company.
Mr. Love had been running the $2.4-billion flagship Trimark Fund, a global equity offering that celebrated its 30th anniversary last September.
He will be succeeded as lead manager by Michael Hatcher who currently oversees the $1.3-billion Trimark Global Fundamental Equity Fund, formerly known as Trimark Select Growth.
"We thank Dana for his contributions to our business and wish him well in his future endeavours," Peter Intraligi, president of Toronto-based Invesco Canada, said in a statement on Thursday.
Over the year ended Jan. 31, Trimark Fund posted a 4 per cent gain as against a 2.2 per cent loss for the MSCI World Index in Canadian dollars. Over three years, the fund gained an annualized 9.9 per cent.
Mr. Love took over Trimark Fund after Tye Bousada left to launch EdgePoint Wealth Management Inc. in 2008 with two other departed Invesco Trimark colleagues, Geoff MacDonald and Patrick Farmer. Ted Chisholm, another Invesco Trimark manager, joined that firm last year.
High-profile manager Richard Jenkins, who once ran Trimark Select Growth, resigned in 2008 to join another former Invesco Trimark colleague Bill Kanko at Black Creek Investment Management Inc.
In 2009, Mr. Love took over Trimark Select Growth and ran that fund similarly to his Trimark Fund with a concentrated portfolio of 30 to 50 names.
But Trimark Select Growth, which has shrunk from $5.9-billion in assets in 2008, was renamed Trimark Global Fundamental Equity last year. That mandate was given to Mr. Hatcher to be run as a diversified portfolio with 60 to 85 names.
Dan Hallett, a fund analyst with HighView Financial Group, said that Mr. Love's departure indicates that "he was unhappy," and that feeling seems to have permeated through the firm's global equity team, which is where most of the departures have come.
"Any time you lose a lead manager, it is a significant loss," Mr. Hallett said. "Mr. Love was probably more conservative than probably any other past manager on Trimark Fund. He missed out on some good recovery potential [in 2009] but at the same time, that helped him last year. His performance overall has been pretty good."
Invesco Trimark, which had been suffering from net redemptions in its mutual funds since 2007, stopped releasing figures about its net flows in the fall of 2010 when it cancelled its membership in the Investment Fund Institute of Canada.
Because its U.S.-based sister company Invesco PowerShares Capital Management LLC is an exchange-traded fund provider, Invesco Trimark has also waded into the ETF arena over the past couple of years.