Close to 30 fund managers are currently working on 10 or more different portfolios, research by Trustnet shows, with one running 23 funds at the moment.
According our data, there are just over 3,500 named individuals and teams working across 4,539 strategies in the Investment Association and Association of Investment Companies universes. But, obviously, there’s more to it than each fund having 1.3 managers running its money.
In this article, we reveal the individual managers who have their names attached to the most funds and trusts today. Of course, that’s not to say that this is a problem in any way – as some of the names on the list have generated strong returns for their investors over the years.
After teams were excluded, the individual fund manager working on the most portfolios is Ian Aylward, who is the head of manager and fund selection at Barclays Wealth and Investment Management.
Aylward is a named manager on 23 funds, serving as sole manager on three of them and lead manager on the other 20. He runs a team of 12 fund selectors that cover long-only equity, fixed income and liquid alternatives managers; this team runs a number of multi-asset and single-asset multi-manager portfolios for Barclays, as well as overseeing mandates with more than 70 third-party groups.
Performance of Aylward vs peer group composite since joining Barclays
Source: FE Analytics
The 23 funds that Aylward works on are found in many sectors, ranging from the multi-asset peer groups to IA UK All Companies to IA Global Bonds. Our data shows there is close to £4bn run across these portfolios, with the largest being the £539.4m Barclays GlobalAccess Global High Yield Bond fund.
Since Aylward was appointed to the funds in December 2016, four of the 23 funds have made top-quartile returns including the £445.5m Barclays GlobalAccess UK Opportunities fund.
Another four are in the second quartile while eight are in the third and six are in the bottom. The remaining fund is in the IA Property Other sector, where quartile rankings are not appropriate.
However, the funds have climbed up the rankings over more recent time frames with seven of them making first-quartile returns over one year and another nine sitting in the second quartile.
Source: FE Analytics
The above table shows all 27 fund managers that are named as working on an Investment Association and Association of Investment Companies portfolio, either as a lead manager, co-manager or deputy manager.
In second place is Kieran Doyle, who is a senior portfolio manager at BlackRock and works in the asset management house’s institutional index equity team.
Doyle works on 21 index trackers in the two investment universes covered by this research, with these funds running more than £70bn between them. The largest is the £11bn iShares UK Equity Index (UK) tracker, while another four funds run more than £5bn each.
In addition, the manager is named on another 13 funds that are domiciled in Dublin or Luxembourg and are listed in the offshore fund sectors.
Quilter Investors’ Paul Craig appears in third place with 18 funds with his name against them, including the £3.3bn Quilter Investors Cirilium Balanced Portfolio and £3.1bn Quilter Investors Cirilium Moderate Portfolio.
There are also some very well-known names on the above list, including Aberdeen Standard Investments’ Bambos Hambi – who runs the MyFolio fund ranges.
These fund-of-fund offerings have a strong following thanks to healthy risk-adjusted returns over the years, with the largest being the £3.8bn ASI MyFolio Managed III fund. Hambi runs more than £15bn across 15 funds, all of which reside in the IA Volatility Managed sector.
Performance of Hambi and Onuekwusi over 5yrs
Source: FE Analytics
Justin Onuekwusi, head of retail multi-asset funds at Legal & General Investment Management, is another popular investor and runs 16 portfolios with combined assets of £7.7bn.
These multi-asset funds are built from range of LGIM’s index trackers and have also generated strong returns in recent years.
Trustnet’s research also found that 2,191 managers are named on just one fund or trust, while 748 work on two. Some 271 work on three portfolios and 123 split their time between four.