In an industry dominated by the large banks and life assurance companies, Oppenheim Investment Managers has successfully carved out a niche for itself in the 19 years since its establishment.
Founded in 1986 as Montgomery Opening, the independent investment manager has survived while other players disappeared from the scene.
Indeed, it has done better than that, it has prospered, becoming one of the Irish pension fund industry's top performers, heading the league table for group pension fund performance over the last 10 years.
With €1.7 billion in funds under management, its pension client list includes well-known companies such as Pfizer, RTÉ and Nissan. Interestingly, it also boasts among its clients units of rival pension fund managers such as Davy Stockbrokers, Hibernian Life & Pensions and Merrill Lynch.
As well as its corporate pensions business, since 1990 Oppenheim has managed the Summit range of investment funds for EBS Building Society, its only offering to the public.
So what accounts for Oppenheim's success? The company's joint managing director and chief investment officer, Joe O'Dwyer, says that the way Oppenheim is run is "very, very different" from most of its peers.
For starters, the company does not define its investment philosophy in the usual, narrow industry terms, tying itself down to a single investment style, such as "growth" or "value" investing.
"Markets are dynamic, never static," O'Dwyer says. "The precepts that held true in the 1970s and 1980s will not hold true forever."
Instead, Oppenheim's team of seven investment managers focuses heavily on capital efficiency, looking closely at the return on capital, the cost of capital and how that feeds into valuations rather than headline earnings growth or price/earnings ratios.
The investment team is also structured differently to the norm. Rather than having US equity or European equity specialists, responsibilities are divided by discipline with a strong emphasis on sectors.
Some members of the team focus on the macroeconomic factors affecting the investment climate, such as interest rates and economic growth, while others watch fundamental or technical factors, such as share price movements.
The increasingly international nature of investment markets in recent years has prompted the firm to focus increasingly on sectors rather than regions. Companies such as CRH and Eircom, for example, are no longer considered solely in an Irish context, but in relation to their international peers.
This sectoral focus also allows the fund manager to pick up on emerging trends. O'Dwyer notes, for instance, that the trends that have made the energy and oil sectors such strong performers in the last year have been in evidence since 2000.
Having spotted them, Oppenheim, which had been underweighing energy in 1999, went overweight in the sector in 2001, well ahead of the pack.
Finally, the fact that Oppenheim is an independent fund manager, overseeing only third-party funds with no distribution network of its own, frees it from having to focus too much on the competition, O'Dwyer believes. Of his rivals, he says: "Their objective is to be in the top quartile in the league table. Our aim is to capture as much upside in the market as possible."
The importance of its investment process, which O'Dwyer defines above all as "collegial", has allowed the firm to weather the departure of two of the names most closely associated with it in recent years.
Its former head of investment, Brian Gray, left the company two years ago to set up a hedge fund for Goodbody Stockbrokers. More recently, company founder Paul Montgomery stepped down in March after a 30-year career in the industry.
"The strength has been the process, not the individuals," O'Dwyer says, noting that he is the fifth person to serve as chief investment officer in the firm's short history. "The nature of the process is that there is always going to be change, so it has to be accommodative of personnel changes."
Montgomery sold his remaining 25 per cent shareholding to the firm's majority shareholder, the Cologne-based investment group, Sal Oppenheim, which now owns the Irish firm outright.
Montgomery Oppenheim's recent name change, to Oppenheim Investment Managers, anchors the Irish company more firmly within the German parent group, which has some €100 billion in funds under management.
As well as providing the Irish firm with fiduciary strength, it also supplies it with independent economic and company research, O'Dwyer says.
"Sal Oppenheim provides an infrastructure we can leverage off while retaining total independent in our investment management."
So where does Oppenheim think equity markets are headed? The company's managed funds are currently 75 per cent invested in global equities, close to their 80 per cent upper limit. This reflects the firm's view that bond markets, having been through a significant bull market, have reached levels that are unsustainably low.
But if the fund manager believes equities can continue to deliver, it is not a fan of all markets. O'Dwyer remains "very cautious" about the US market, where he believes that earnings growth cannot continue to surprise on the upside.
As a result, Oppenheim, like many other investment professionals, is underweight in US equities and overweight in Europe, where it believes markets can deliver a return of 4.5 per cent above risk-free assets.
But Oppenheim also believes that after a period of dominance, the future is no longer "Anglo Saxon". "There is a growing recognition that the world is not Caucasian," he says. "We will see a continued increase in the importance of non-Caucasian markets, such as emerging and Asian markets."
And finally, what are the pension fund manager's top five stock picks at the moment? British oil giant BP, Australian mining group BHP Billiton, Siemens, GlaxoSmithKline and low-fares airline Ryanair make up O'Dwyer's regionally and sectorally varied list.
He notes, for instance, that BP is currently trading at similar levels to 2000, despite a tripling in the price of oil in the meantime, making it a good long-term play on the sector.
