TreeTop Asset Management, a boutique of four veteran fund managers whose watchword is "global", has propelled itself into the retail spotlight with a set of strong performance figures.

They have been in business since 2005 and have amassed $2billion (£1.3 billion) in assets under management … but few British fund strategists will have heard of them.

TreeTop Asset Management is a boutique of just four ­veteran fund managers but with offices in Luxembourg, Brussels and London. And the watchword in everything it does is “global”.

Its Global Opportunities fund is coming to the attention of retail investors after strong three-year performance ­figures. Managed by Peter Robson, it was launched in January 2008 and ran into a market storm. In its first year it lost 42.4%, a dismal start for any fund, and significantly worse than the MSCI World (All Countries) index. “It would have been rather better if we had launched a year later,” says Robson.

But 2009 was much, much kinder. The fund bounced back strongly, recording a 73.9% gain, well ahead of the MSCI’s 29.2% rise. And in 2010 it earned its investors a further 18.1% against 10% on the index. After a halting start, Robson has settled into his stride.

If you manage a global fund, quite where you start is the first question. There are thousands upon thousands of stocks to choose from. Robson’s approach is to look for stocks with accelerating earnings growth but which he considers still reasonably priced. He pays no attention to benchmarks.

“We are unusual in as far as all we do is global,” he says. “And we have four investment managers who have an average experience of 25 years. The other unique selling point about TreeTop is that we do not believe in using benchmarks in the investment process. We believe benchmarks just represent history, while investing is about the future.”

The philosophy of the fund is all about earnings growth. “But it’s not sufficient to have earnings growth in itself. It has to be accelerating earnings growth,” says Robson.

This process takes the fund heavily into the Asia Pacific region, although not exclusively so. It is currently 41.6% in Asia Pacific, 27% in North America and 26% in Europe.

“Our process pushes us into areas where there is a tailwind of growth,” Robson says. “That allows us to reduce the large universe presented to us down to a much narrower base. We don’t feel we have to be in areas where economies are difficult or getting worse.”

Is a global fund inevitably going to be biased towards large caps? No, says Robson. “I’m ambivalent about holding large or small caps, so long as there is sufficient liquidity. We go from $100 billion to $100m in the portfolio.”

He finds accelerating earnings growth in two distinct parts of the market. First, where there is a cyclical recovery, such as the paper and packaging sector worldwide. “We are only now seeing an inflexion point in that industry,” he says.

Secondly, investors can exploit accelerating earnings in structural growth areas, which is why the fund is so exposed to the Asia Pacific region.

The screening process tends to throw up about 120 names that Robson monitors closely and narrows down to 50-70 stocks for inclusion into the portfolio. But this is not a concentrated portfolio - Robson is wary of taking too much stock-specific risk and his largest companies will only be about 2-2.5% of the fund.

Turnover is about 100%, which along with the annual charge of 1.2% will depress returns. Robson says there is no typical holding period - a stock may be in the fund for a month or three years, depending on whether it has hit its price target.

During its first year the fund suffered badly as valuations were ignored in the dash to safety. But from early 2009 onwards the fund benefited from adopting a strongly pro-cyclical stance. “I’d visited the US, and felt that although things were bad, they were getting less bad,” Robson says. “So I went into cyclicals, buying stocks such as Goldman Sachs and Urban Outfitters. One of our China stocks, Advance Information Services, also did very well for us.”

Stock performance during 2010 was more broadly spread, although he highlights Sumida of Japan as a star performer. ­Sumida makes electric coils for cars and as the auto industry began to rev up again it benefited hugely.

Today, it’s industry and technology that interests Robson, plus the opportunities in America and Europe as growth finally begins to pick up.

“We know that the balance sheets of both the Fed and the US consumer are highly indebted,” he says. “The one area where there is cash is in corporates. They are holding very high levels of cash, which by some measures are at a 50-year high. That is producing a very strong capex [capital investment] cycle, which is not going into increasing capacity but improving productivity and brand name, so that they can expand into emerging markets.”

Robson remains deeply sceptical of European financials. “We still have a long way to go before we see the issues in the European periphery worked out,” he warns.

That said, he likes the German consumer. He holds German DIY chain Praktiker, a one-time division of Metro that was spun off in 2005. It hit a high of about €32 in mid-2007 but has fallen heavily and is trading just below €9 (£7.80).

One of his favourite stocks is Hyundai, the world’s fastest-growing car maker. He doesn’t, though, invest in Hyundai itself, but its parts market, Hyundai Mobis. Mobis has a monopoly of after-sales parts for the car group, and interestingly the family group behind Hyundai own more of the Mobis arm than they do of the manufacturing arm. They know where the profits are. Yet Mobis is trading on less than 10 times earnings.

The Global Opportunities portfolio is long only and largely unhedged, although Robson does have a hedge on the Australian dollar. It is a Luxembourg-registered Ucits III fund, with sterling, euro and dollar classes.

TreeTop is making its main retail push in the Benelux countries, investing heavily in distribution there. But if ­Robson remains top of the tree on performance, there is no reason why a push into Britain shouldn’t be successful.