The All Ordinaries Index (ASX: XAO) has gained 5.5% since recovering from the market dip on 8 August, with one ASX All Ords stock doing plenty of the heavy lifting.
The fast-rising company in question is MA Financial Group Ltd (ASX: MAF).
On August 8, you could have bought shares in the ASX financial services company for $3.95. In late afternoon trade on Friday, shares are changing hands for $5.56 apiece.
While that's down 1.4% in intraday trade today and down 0.4% year to date, the ASX All Ords stock has surged 40.8% since early August.
And according to David Poppenbeek, lead portfolio manager of K2 Asset Management's Australian small-cap fund, MA Financial shares look well-placed to deliver more outperformance in 2025 (courtesy of The Australian Financial Review).
Asked which stock in his fund has the most near-term upside potential, Poppenbeek tipped MA Financial.
"MA Financial is an alternative asset manager that listed on the ASX in 2017, and today has a market capitalisation of $1 billion," he said.
Explaining his bullishness on the ASX All Ords stock, Poppenbeek said:
Over the past five years, the company has taken advantage of growth prospects available in the non-bank lending sector. Since 2019, its asset management arm has created more than $4 billion of private credit and fixed-income funds.
Then in 2022, MA Financial acquired the Finsure lending platform and has built that up to $128 billion of managed loans. It also announced recently that its residential mortgage business, MA Money, had grown the loan book out to $1.7 billion and, after several years of losses, was now break-even.
MA Financial reported its half-year results on 22 August. The company is scheduled to release its full 2024 calendar year results in February.
And Poppenbeek expects those numbers could provide more tailwinds for the ASX All Ords stock in 2025.
"The strength of the company's operational momentum should be evident at the release of the 2024 full-year profit result in two months' time and a higher level of investor interest may well follow," he said.
Atop potential share price gains, MA Financial trades on a 3.6% fully franked trailing dividend yield.
For its third quarter results (Q3 2024), the financial services company reported record gross fund inflows of $1.6 billion for the nine months to 30 September, up 25% from the prior corresponding period.
Assets under management (AUM) for the ASX All Ords stock were up 11% from Q3 2023 to $9.9 billion.
And the $1.7 billion reported for the MA Money loan book for Q3 2024, which Poppenbeek referred to, represented a year on year increase of 180%.
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