KUWAIT: Burgan Bank announced yesterday that its Burgan Equity Fund has been named as the ‘Best Equity Fund over 10 years’ in the prestigious Thomson Reuters Lipper Award MENA Markets. For more than three decades and in over 20 countries worldwide, the Thomson Reuters Lipper Fund Awards have honored funds and fund management firms that have excelled in providing consistently strong riskadjusted performance relative to their peers. In a joint press release, Burgan Bank and KAMCO Investment Company declared that The Burgan Equity Fund follows a balanced investment policy that targets long-term capital gains with minimum risk.

The fund invests across a wide range of sectors including consumer services, oil & gas, telecommunications, basic materials, consumer goods, real estate, financial services, industrial, and banking. Burgan Equity Fund’s cumulative return since inception on 9 December 2001 has increased in value by 115.9% as of end of December 2015, while in 2016 till August 2016, the fund has outperformed the Kuwaiti Stock Exchange weighted index by approximately 7%.

The ‘Best Equity Fund over 10 years’ award is a recognition of the Fund’s consistent longterm outperformance compared to its benchmark, which is a result of efficient asset allocation where Burgan Bank played the role of fund manager, in collaboration with KAMCO Investment Company, as external advisor of the fund.

Burgan Equity Fund, a collaboration between the fund manager Burgan Bank and the external advisor KAMCO, focuses to provide unit holders with excellent returns by investing the Fund’s assets in shares of companies listed on Kuwait Stock Exchange (“KSE”). Within the 5-year period, which started in July 2011 until July 2016, the Fund generated cumulative alpha of 16.4% over the KSE weighted index. The Fund is considered one of the best performing funds on a risk adjusted return basis (based on a basket of 10 funds with minimum asset under management of KD 10 million).