Nanuk lands AustralianSuper investment heavyweight

Nanuk Asset Management adds serious firepower to its investment team when it appointed Oliver Johnson, formerly at AustralianSuper, as portfolio manager early this month.

Prior to the announcement, Johnson was a senior portfolio manager at AustralianSuper where he worked in the global internal fundamental equities team for 10 years across the fund's Melbourne and London offices.

During his tenure, Johnson was a co-architect of the internal fundamental equities capability, which he helped design and scale to approximately A$20 billion in assets under management.

Earlier in his career he held global equities research and portfolio management roles at Alliance Trust, Nomura Asset Management and Exane BNP Paribas across London and Paris.

Tom King, Nanuk's chief investment officer, said he was delighted to welcome Johnson to the group. "He is a highly regarded portfolio manager with a track record of alpha generation and deep expertise across a wide range of opportunities relevant to the New World strategy."

King added that the appointment reflects Nanuk's ongoing commitment to clients as the firm grows across Australian and New Zealand markets>While at AustralianSuper, Johnson also led the evaluation and benchmarking of AI tools used to augment the fund's fundamental research. In his new role, he will bring the same hands-on experience integrating quantitative, alternative data and artificial intelligence tools to the fund's research workflows.

"This is an area of active development for Nanuk as [we] embed LLM-based capabilities into our research process in conjunction with our recently appointed Head of Research, Marco Lo Blanco," the group said in a statement.