Asset Allocator’s quest to dine in every London restaurant of note took a great leap forward recently when we caught up with Ben Conway, chief investment officer at Hawksmoor.

Conway confided that he is “frothing at the mouth” at the scale of the opportunity he is seeing in UK equities at the moment. 

He says “our guiding light as investors is valuation, we look at the outflows from the UK market and I can’t believe what others are doing. UK equities are cheap relative both to their own history and relative to other markets.”  

Conway adds that he finds best value in the small- and mid-cap part of the UK market so the UK funds he owns include Artemis UK Select, which is run by Ed Legget and is held within five other of the portfolios we monitor. He also allocates to the Aberforth Smaller Companies fund and to investment trusts such as Strategic Equity Capital, which is run by Gresham House's Ken Wotton, who runs a number of other popular UK small cap funds.

Hawksmoor tends to use a blend of active and passive strategies, but one area where they believe there is value in active is US mid- and small-cap, where the fund he owns is De Lisle American.

Conway says the governing principle for fund selection at his firm is that bigger funds have much less chance to outperform, and as such he prefers smaller mandates.

He is also keen on Japanese equities, but says the recent share price rises have reduced his ardour there.