The debate between the virtues of these two styles has become very prevalent in recent years and while many investment consultants try to categorise equity managers or stocks in just one category or another, we believe that there are many grey areas that exist. For example, splitting the Australian market into value and growth stocks may be misleading given that the Australian markets does not have the depth of many larger markets because the top 10 Australian stocks account for 50% of the All Ordinaries by market cap.

The debate seems to have escalated in the last few years, and in particular since the late 1990's when the US stock market reached record high levels. At t...