HEAD-TO-HEAD: JP Morgan versus Matthews Asia

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MANAGER REVIEW

Joanna Kwok and Mark Davids have been running the JPM Asia Growth fund together since its revamp in 2015, when it was turned into a UK open-ended investment company, according to McDermott.

“Kwok joined JP Morgan in 2002 as an analyst in the fixed income team, and then switched to equities in 2005 as a portfolio manager specialising in smaller companies,” he said.

Prior to this, she spent three years with PwC in London – where she qualified as a chartered accountant – and one year in Hong Kong as a senior associate in the firm’s banking and capital markets division.

Comanager Mark Davids has been with JP Morgan since 1997, starting out as a pan-European investment analyst after a period working for the European Commission.

“In 2007, he relocated from London to Tokyo to head the behavioural finance desk, before moving to Hong Kong in 2009 to expand this role across JP Morgan’s Asia Pacific divisions,” said McDermott.

Davids has comanaged the JP Morgan Asia Pacific Equity strategy since 2009 and is Kwok’s backup manager on the JPM Asian Smaller Companies Fund.

While he also co-heads the Asia-Pacific regional team within the wider emerging-markets and Asia-Pacific equities group, most of his time is devoted to portfolio management.

Davids and Kwok provide good stock-specific and industry-level insights and clearly make good use of the vast analytical resources available to them, according to McDermott.

The lead manager of the Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund, Sharat Shroff, joined Matthews Asia in 2005 as a research analyst, before becoming part of the strategy’s management team as a co-lead manager in 2008 and then sole lead manager in 2014.

“In addition to running this fund, Shroff co-manages the firm’s Asia growth, Asia focus and India strategies, and has more than two decades experience in the investment industry,” said McDermott.

Previously, he worked in the San Francisco and Hong Kong offices of Morgan Stanley as an equity research associate. He has a Bachelor of Technology from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, India and an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management, in Calcutta, India. He is fluent in Hindi and Bengali.

Shroff is supported by deputy co-managers Raymond Deng and Inbok Song, who are part of a team of five Asia portfolio managers that are backed by 34 Asia analysts.

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