The top 10 Aussie equity funds delivered north of 20% last FY (the best nearly doubled it)

Ophir Opportunities Fund

Please note that this fund is hard closed, but you can invest in the Ophir Global Opportunities Fund - it delivered 41.8% last financial year.

The Fund typically invests in 30-50 companies listed outside of the S&P/ASX 100. Utilising Ophir’s extensive fundamental, bottom-up research process, the Fund focuses on identifying high-quality emerging businesses exposed to structural growth opportunities.

With a bias toward cash-generative businesses with sound balance sheets and highly capable management teams, the Fund seeks to identify these opportunities early in a company’s life cycle, when it is typically under-researched and under-valued by the investment market. The Fund is managed by Andrew Mitchell and Steven Ng.

#2. Forager Australian Share Fund

Forager Australian Shares Fund

The Fund’s strategy is to invest in a concentrated portfolio of 15-50 underappreciated Australian (and some New Zealand) stocks that it anticipates will outperform the return from Australian equities over rolling 5-year periods. The Fund is managed by Steve Johnson.

According to the Forager Annual Report, "the 2025 financial year was one of the best in Forager’s 15-year history".

Source: Forager Annual Report

Outlook

The excerpt below is from the Forager Annual Report

Where will the best opportunities lie over the next 12 months? Your guess is as good as ours. Our funds’ results weren’t the product of predicting the past year’s tumultuous events.

They came from building portfolios ready for a broad range of potential outcomes and reacting to opportunities as they appeared.

We work hard to avoid pre-conceived ideas—they only make it harder to change your mind. Instead, we contemplate as many scenarios as possible and aim never to be surprised. That might seem like a bug, but it’s a feature of Forager’s approach. The future is inherently uncertain, and no amount of research can change that.

#3. Ausbil Australian Small Cap

Ausbil Australian SmallCap

The Fund provides exposure to an actively managed portfolio, predominantly made up of listed small-cap Australian equities, which are primarily chosen from the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries Index constituents. The Fund is managed by Arden Jennings and Andrew Peros.

Ausbil believes that active management of portfolios facilitates consistent and risk-controlled outperformance. Rather than focusing only on growth or value investing, Ausbil’s investment processes allow it to exploit the inefficiencies across the entire market, at all stages of the cycle and across all market conditions. Ausbil’s active investment process aims to exploit the inefficiencies across the small and micro cap market, at all stages of the cycle and across all market conditions, with the aim of producing consistent and risk-controlled outperformance.

The Fund is designed for investors with at least a five-year investment time horizon, who wish to benefit from the long-term capital gains available from share investments and who are comfortable with fluctuations in capital value in the short to medium term.

Fund objective

To achieve returns (before fees and taxes) in excess of the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries Accumulation Index over the medium to long term. There is no guarantee that this objective will be achieved.

Fund review

The excerpts below are from the Ausbil Monthly Fund Update

The 2025 financial year (FY25) delivered outstanding results for clients, with the Fund delivering +28.62% (net of fees), outperforming the Small Ordinaries Accumulation Index by +12.26%. Despite FY25 experiencing multiple bouts of volatility with the ‘Yen carry trade’ unwind, a US Presidential Election, a Tariff-induced market correction and ongoing geopolitical conflict, stock selection was sound. The Fund’s FY25 scorecard reflected this, with the largest detractor, WEB Travel, smaller than the Fund’s 11th largest winner.

Winners were led by:

Life360 (ASX:360) (+97%),
Genesis Minerals (ASX: GMD) (+145%),
Generation Development (ASX: GDG) (+116%),
HUB24 (ASX: HUB) (+93%),
Codan (ASX: CDA) (+71%)

All are existing positions leading into FY25, all successful Microcap ‘graduates’, and remain high-conviction fund holdings. Since inception, the Fund has returned +25.09% p.a. (net of fees), outperforming the Small Ordinaries return of +8.82%.

Outlook

We remain reasonably optimistic about the outlook for equity markets, despite the recent volatility.

So long as broader economic and corporate data doesn’t materially underwhelm and the US avoids slipping into recession, there is still ample support available (both fiscal and monetary) to underpin economic growth, which is ultimately good for equity markets.

The Small Ordinaries Index has rallied +18% from the April lows, shaking off a number of issues and concerns, including elevated market valuations. Against this backdrop, many have questioned the durability of the rally; however, we would expect the breadth of the rally to improve as excess cash on the sidelines is subsequently put to work. This likely signals a shift toward more individual stock-picking, which is more akin to the Ausbil fundamental bottom-up process.

#4. Acorn Capital NextGen Resources Fund

Acorn Capital NextGen Resources Fund