At the time of writing this fund had not yet launched and so no performance data were available for analysis. However, lead manager Tom Walker has built a strong record of outperformance of our US mainstream peer group since taking on the North American fund in 2002.That fund has 40 stocks and the portfolio is constructed with limits on sector exposure and overall tracking error relative to its benchmark. This means that performance is not directly comparable to this more concentrated and unconstrained mandate.It has, however, delivered consistently strong relative performance, except for 2004 when it was hurt by its largecap bias, and cumulatively the fund ranks in the top quartile of our peer group over thee and five years to September.Throughout this period stock selection has consistently been the key driver of performance. Since June 2006 Walker has also run a 10 stock North American fund for an institutional client but while we understand that the fund has a good, if short, performance record we have not seen performance attribution data for it.