Threadneedle European Select co-manager Ben Moore will be promoted to lead manager of the top-performing fund next year while fellow co-manager David Dudding concentrates on growing his global strategy. 
FE fundinfo Alpha Manager Dudding has run the £1.9bn fund since July 2008 and Moore (pictured) was appointed co-manager in April 2019. Moore will be named lead manager on 2 January while Dudding will become deputy and spend more time working on his Threadneedle Global Focus fund.
Threadneedle European Select is a ‘best ideas’ portfolio that owns high-quality companies with the competitive advantage and pricing power to generate strong and sustainable returns. It has a large-cap growth bias, which has resulted in successful long-term performance.
Moore said: “I don't expect any change at all in the way we're doing things. The approach for this fund isn't changing and that's important to me.
“For me, what was important was to have a lot of confidence that I look at the world in a very similar way to David. I’ve worked with him for five years and I can put my hand on my heart and say that we do look at the world in a very similar way.”
Companies are assessed using Porter’s Five Forces, which is a tool devised by Michael E. Porter of Harvard University to analyse the competition of a business. The ‘forces’ it examines are the threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers and competitive rivalry.
This approach appears to have paid off over much of the recent past. FE Analytics shows the fund has generated a top-quartile total return of 15.24 per cent over 2020 so far, compared with a 9.34 per cent return from its average peer in the IA Europe ex UK sector.
It’s also in the peer group’s first quartile over three, five, 10 and 20 years. The chart below highlights the extent of the fund’s outperformance over its sector and benchmark over the past decade.
Performance of fund vs sector and index over 10yrs
Source: FE Analytics
Dudding and Moore sum up the approach used on the fund as ‘get rich slow’. It calls for the manager try to act like an owner of the businesses they buy, which in practice means being “very particular” about the kinds of stock they invest in, spending a lot of time understanding the industry a company operates in and holding for the long term.
Moore started his investment career with a six-year stint at Goldman Sachs as an equity research analyst within its European mid-cap team. He joined Columbia Threadneedle’s European equities team in 2015 as an equity analyst, researching small-cap European companies, while serving as deputy portfolio manager of the Threadneedle European Smaller Companies strategy.
This background in small-cap investing keeps up something of a tradition on Threadneedle European Select. 
Dudding (pictured) said: “I took over Threadneedle European Select in July 2008 and my background is in small-cap - at the time, I was running the small-cap fund. Paul Doyle ran it before me and his background was also in small-cap.
“We have a small-cap franchise that has gone from strength to strength and we really do see it as a great breeding ground for fund managers.”
Moore added: “Small-cap is a bit like spending some time in accident & emergency when you're training to be a doctor. You just have a lot of things going through your hands.
“You see all sorts of different business models, all sorts of different things happening to these businesses, all sorts of events and how they impact the businesses. You just have a very broad range of experience to draw from.”
Dudding’s £159m Threadneedle Global Focus fund takes a similar approach to Threadneedle European Select, in that it’s a ‘best ideas’ strategy that can search globally for stocks.
Performance of fund vs sector and index since launch
Source: FE Analytics
The Oeic was launched in April 2014 and since then has made a 65.62 per cent total return, which puts it in the top quartile of the IA Global sector. The $1.5bn offshore version of the fund, which is also managed by Dudding, has a longer track record and is first -quartile over one, three, five and 10 years.
Threadneedle European Select has an ongoing charges figure (OCF) of 0.80 per cent, while Threadneedle Global Focus has a 0.90 per cent OCF.