Blissfully Olam Free Funds

I haven’t read anything about fund exposure to Olam, so I figure this would be blogworthy.

19 November, Muddy Waters’ Carson Block is quoted by Jesse Westbrook for Bloomberg, saying he is betting against Olam. Requote: “We think the company will fail.” And with the recent saber rattling between Olam vs Muddy Waters, I’d thought it’d be worth a little time to dig up all the end-October factsheets of the various Singapore equity funds to see if any fund managers had a position in the neck-deep-in-Muddy-Waters Olam.

Based on end-October factsheets, none of the following funds on Fundsupermart have listed Olam in their top holdings.

Olam-free Singapore Equity funds	Olam-free Singapore Bond Funds
Aberdeen Singapore Equity	Eastspring Inv UT SG Select Bd A
Amundi Spore Dividend Growth	Legg Mason WA Spore Bond Class A SGD
DWS SGP small/midCap A SGD	LionGlobal Spore Fixed Inc-A
DWS Singapore Eqty Fd	Manulife Singapore Bond A SGD
HGIF Spore Eq-A USD	PineBridge Singapore Bond Fund
JF Singapore A (dist) USD	Schroder SG Fixed Income Fd CL A
Legg Mason WA Spore Opp Trust ClA S$	United Singapore Bond Fund
LionGlobal Singapore Trust
Manulife Singapore Equity A SGD
Nikko AM Shenton Thrift Fund
Schroder Singapore Trust Cl A
Singapore Dividend Equity Fund
United Singapore Growth Fund
source: respective factsheets, as at end-Oct 2012

This doesn’t discount the possibility of being exposed to Olam; since top holdings are only updated on factsheets monthly, there’s the possibility of a fund taking a position between 1 Nov 2012 and 19 Nov 2012, which would then expose the fund to Olam’s share price movements. 

source: Yahoo!Finance, last accessed 2 Dec 2012

Looking through Olam’s 2012 Annual Report throws up a list of shareholders, with some pretty big names, as well-reported in the media.

Source: Olam 2012 Annual Report, last accessed 2 Dec 2012

As far as I’m aware, the asset management firm there with any sort of retail presence is AllianceBerstein, and parent, the AXA Group. But, as they’re not present in the Singapore equity/bond space, I’ll leave it at that for now.