‘Balanced’ multi-asset funds that have a focus on income have tended to achieve some of their sector’s best risk-adjusted returns over recent years, according to a new FE Trustnet study, as the search for yield has driven income-paying asset ever higher. 
In recent months, we have been subjecting the various Investment Association sectors to a rigorous test by reviewing their decile rankings cumulative five-year returns up to the end of 2015 as well as the annual returns of 2015, 2014 and 2013, annualised volatility, maximum drawdown, downside capture, alpha generation, Sharpe ratio and upside capture.
We then added up the 10 decile rankings for each fund in the sector to give a simple score, where a 10 shows a fund has been first decile in each metric and a 100 would indicate 10th decile performance in each.
This time it’s the turn of the popular IA Mixed Investment 20% 60% Shares sector. We’ve taken the FTSE WMA Stock Market Balanced as the benchmark as it covers a range of equities, bonds, alternative assets and complex strategies, even though none of the funds here use it as their own benchmark.
In the following article, we reveal the five funds with the best scores in our study – including two managed by the same high-flying team.
