The Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF), which was val­ued at US$5,533.4 mil­lion on Oc­to­ber 1, 2014, in­creased mod­est­ly to US$5,655.4 mil­lion by Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015, reg­is­ter­ing an in­crease of just 2.47 per cent.

Fund chair­man Dr Ralph Hen­ry said this was well be­low its per­for­mance as in the pre­vi­ous year it grew by 7.65 per cent.

"Be­hind this low­er re­turn, there was an un­der­ly­ing volatil­i­ty in the mar­ket place. In­deed, the as­set val­u­a­tion of the Fund in­creased over the first two quar­ters of the fi­nan­cial year, and stood at US$5,779.4 mil­lion at the end of March 2015, but de­clined over the next two quar­ters," he said in the HSF's 2015 an­nu­al re­port which has just been re­leased by the Min­istry of Fi­nance.

Dr Hen­ry added: "Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, through­out the en­tire year, the Fund out­per­formed its com­pos­ite bench­mark, and, even in de­cline, per­formed bet­ter by reg­is­ter­ing de­creas­es low­er than the bench­mark.

The chair­man, in his as­sess­ment of the fund's per­for­mance, said in Sep­tem­ber 2014, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter based Gov­ern­ment's ex­pect­ed rev­enues for fis­cal year 2014/2015 on a pro­ject­ed oil price of US$80 per bar­rel. How­ev­er, there was the start of "an in­ex­orable de­cline in en­er­gy prices dur­ing the course of the year" and they nev­er reached a lev­el re­quir­ing place­ments by the Gov­ern­ment to the HSF.

Dr Hen­ry said the as­set val­u­a­tion of the HSF in­creased over the first two quar­ters of the fi­nan­cial year, and stood at US$5,779.4 mil­lion at the end of March 2015, but de­clined over the next two quar­ters.

He added: "Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, through­out the en­tire year, the Fund out­per­formed its com­pos­ite bench­mark, and, even in de­cline, per­formed bet­ter by reg­is­ter­ing de­creas­es low­er than the bench­mark."

He said three ma­jor is­sues en­gaged the at­ten­tion of fund-man­agers dur­ing the year. They were the date at which the US Fed­er­al Re­serve Bank would im­ple­ment a change in its pol­i­cy of quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing, and in trig­ger­ing an in­crease in in­ter­est rates; the fis­cal cri­sis of the Greek Gov­ern­ment and the treat­ment of its debt with­in the Eu­ro­pean Union; and the weak per­for­mance in the Eu­ro­pean economies along with the slow­ing of eco­nom­ic growth in Chi­na and among the oth­er BRICs, in the glob­al trad­ing sys­tem.