Acumen recognised at the MENA Fund Manager Performance Awards 2026

At the MENA Fund Manager Performance Awards 2026 dinner held in Dubai, Acumen Asset Management received Best MENA Equity Fund for the Kheir Fund and was Highly Commended in the MENA Asset Manager of the Year category. The awards recognise three-year risk-adjusted returns to year-end 2025.

It is worth being precise about what these awards measure. The assessments are based on three-year risk-adjusted returns to the end of 2025 — a window long enough to span meaningfully different market conditions, and a methodology that asks not only what a fund returned but how much risk it took to earn it. We value that framing because it matches how we ask clients to judge us. A strong single year can be luck; a strong three-year risk-adjusted record is much harder to achieve by accident, and it is the closest an external measure comes to testing process rather than outcome.

The process behind the Kheir Fund is deliberately unexciting. The strategy rests on bottom-up research into a universe we believe we can know deeply, valuation discipline that forces us to reduce what has become expensive as readily as we buy what has become cheap, and position sizing that treats risk management as part of stock selection rather than an overlay applied afterwards. None of these elements is novel on its own. The compounding advantage, in our experience, comes from applying them consistently through conditions that tempt a manager to do something else — and the stretches that reward that consistency are usually the ones that punished improvisation elsewhere.

The Highly Commended recognition in the asset manager category speaks to something different: not one strategy's numbers but the platform behind them. Research, risk, operations, and client reporting are shared infrastructure across our mandates, and the habits that produce a competitive equity fund — written investment cases, pre-agreed sell disciplines, honest post-mortems on what went wrong — are house habits rather than one team's. We read the commendation as a signal that this consistency is visible from the outside, across the platform and not only in a single product.

For clients, the practical meaning of an award is limited, and we would rather say so plainly than trade on the trophy. Recognition is a lagging indicator; it describes the period behind us and promises nothing about the one ahead. What it does provide is independent, methodology-based confirmation that the results clients have experienced were earned the way we said they would be earned — through a repeatable process rather than a concentrated bet that happened to work. Our commitment after the awards dinner is the same as before it: the same process, applied with the same discipline, in whatever conditions the next three-year window brings.