In this year's awards ceremony held at the Island Shangri-La in Pacific Place, Fidelity Investments Management (Hong Kong) won all three of the Best Performing Fund Management Group awards, coming out as the top fund management house over three, five and 10 years.

This brings the United States-based firm's tally of the coveted group awards, which reward the fund management firms that can best manage with stability a spectrum of investments, to five in the past two years.

Fidelity Hong Kong also won two three-year awards in the euro-denominated bond and high-yielding US-dollar-denominated bond categories, as well as five- and 10-year awards in the equity Europe category.

With a total of 70 awards for individual sectors up for grabs, there were plenty of other winners. Honours were quite evenly spread among asset management firms, although a few other firms stood out.

Merrill Lynch International Investment Funds won six awards. The company was the best manager of European emerging market equity funds and Latin America equity funds over the past three years.

The firm also topped the smaller companies North America category over five years, the equity UK category over 10 years and the finance sector category over three and five years.

First State Investments (Hong Kong) also stood out, coming up just one award short of a clean sweep of the Greater China region equity fund categories. It triumphed in the Hong Kong equity category over three and five years, the China equity category over three and five years, and the Greater China equity category over three years, losing out only to Value Partners in the Greater China equity category over five years.

Invesco, a regular fixture in the award, claimed gongs in the equity Asia Pacific excluding Japan, equity Europe excluding the UK, equity UK and smaller companies Japan categories.

Commenting on the awards, Surinder Kathpalia, managing director and regional manager for Standard & Poor's Asia, said the assessment methodology developed by S&P Fund Services to identify the winners had become a worldwide standard for gauging fund management.

'[Awards schemes organised by S&P] have come to be accepted globally as the performance standard against which fund managers and investment management groups are measured,' Mr Kathpalia said.

'We believe a key strength of our awards, which differentiates them from our competitors, is that they are based on a global model that has been refined over many years.

'We bring independence and impartial views afforded by the Standard & Poor's brand. We provide investors with the independent benchmarks they need to feel more confident about their investment and financial decisions.'

Fund performance is gauged through the relative risk-adjusted ratio, which aims to identify those funds that not only perform well relative to other funds in their peer group, but do so with consistency.

'Standard & Poor's believes the relative risk-adjusted ratio is a superior performance measurement to traditional 'absolute' return and risk calculations,' said Cynthia Case, funds product director at S&P.

'Rather than just looking at the performance at the beginning and end of the review period, the Standard & Poor's Fund Awards examine the entire journey by focusing on a fund's monthly relative returns compared to its peers.

'Only funds that have consistently delivered above-average results against their competition can win our awards.'

The ratio was developed by S&P in 1992 in response to a request from the Hong Kong Unit Trust Association to find a new way of measuring fund performance for its annual awards.

'They wanted to reward not only superior performance but also the consistency of that outperformance relative to an appropriate benchmark. Funds that steadily pulled ahead of their benchmark should be rewarded over funds that were more erratic against their benchmark, even if both rose by similar percentages,' Ms Case said.

Before developing the relative risk-adjusted ratio, Standard & Poor's used various measures of risk and reward and the ratios between them to assess fund performance, but none of these measured consistency of outperformance against a benchmark, she said.

'Funds that tend to do well under [the relative risk-adjusted ratio] method are those that behave similarly to their sector [they rise and fall together] but steadily pull ahead of their peers over time,' she added.