With three managers at the top of the global equity sector for 2009, a new boutique has come onto the radar screen of Citywire and of fund selectors around Europe.

Treetop Asset Management was founded by former Merrill Lynch convertibles manager Jacques Berghmans in 2005. It originally started as a convertibles specialist and quickly gathered €1.5 billion into its strategies, including the Treetop Convertible International fund. But in 2009, its performance in global equities has shot the firm to wider prominence.

Out of the 973 fund managers active in the global equity sector in 2009, top place for total returns was taken by Berghmans and Hubert d'Ansembourg, who delivered 78.9% with the Treetop Sequoia Equity fund, which is a pure­ equity replication of its convertible bond flagship fund.

In second place in the sector for total returns in 2009 was Peter Robson, who runs the firm's Global Opportunities fund. As well as returning 75.6% over the year, he also produced the third highest risk adjusted performance of the 973 managers. His information ratio of 3.11 for the year was bettered only by M&G's Graham French and Swedish boutique manager Erik Lundkvist.

Robson joined the firm in 2007 when Berghmans was embarking on a star manager hiring programme to expand the company's equity fund offering and was handed the Global Opportunities fund from its January 2008 launch. Robson had previously worked at highly­rated London firm TT International, where he was responsible for Asia, as well as Batterymarch and Oeschsle International Advisors in the US.

Robson spent ten of his 22 years' fund management experience focused on Asia, and that seems to be reflected by a 50% allocation in his global fund to the Pacific region. 'I have a good knowledge of Asia. It has been advantageous and will continue to be for another ten years,' Robson said.

He targets alpha of between 5% and 10% per year, investing in companies displaying accelerated earnings growth. His portfolio contains between 50 and 70 stocks out of a universe of 8,000. 'It is a top ideas portfolio, absolutely unconstrained by indices. It is fine to judge me by a benchmark, but it is absolutely incompatible for me to run a portfolio against a benchmark,' he said.

Currently his top holding is Chinese software outsourcer VanceInfo Technologies, which reflects two of the areas he is most positive about: Asia and technology. 'I still see Asia as the stand out opportunity in the next three years. Demographics, savings rates and balance sheets ­ including government, corporate and consumer ­ all point to more sustained growth than anywhere in the West,' he said.

He is also 'reasonably positive' about the US. 'It is coming out of recession with its corporations in great shape,' he said. A number of his tech plays are from the US, including Cisco and Polycom.

He thinks that a decade after the tech crash, the tech sector has seen years of under investment and that on a relative P/E basis US IT stocks are at a 50 year low. 'These are exciting times for tech; a whole raft of new technologies are getting rolled out, from cloud computing, to LEDs to video on demand,' he said.

Since launch in January 2008, Robson's €50 million TreeTop Global Opportunities fund has returned 3.8% in euro terms, compared to a fall in the MSCI World of 10.8%.