Half of the top 10 best-performing funds come from this sector and are still positioned with a significant weighting towards equities, pushing the upper limits of the sector’s rules. The £88.8m CIS Sustainable World fund has 79 per cent invested in equities, while boutique manager McInroy & Wood’s £258.8m Balanced fund has 75 per cent in equities.
However, recent research from S&P Capital IQ indicates the returns posted by some of these funds could have been even stronger. Last month, Randal Goldsmith, head of asset allocation at S&P Capital IQ, said: “We know of no flexible multi-asset funds that were zero, or close to zero, in risk assets in the first half of the year and then fully invested in risk assets in the second half, which would have generated significant outperformance, or even to have just been very aggressive for the whole year, which would also have produced meaningful outperformance.”
But in a three-year period punctuated by political turmoil, the eurozone debt crisis and volatile equity and bond markets, returns in excess of 30 per cent, as achieved by these top-10 performers, are not to be sniffed at.
Nick Reeve is senior reporter at Investment Adviser
