KAMES Capital’s Stephen Snowden held onto his position at the top of The Herald’s latest league table of Scottish fund managers after continuing to climb the ranks of financial information group Citywire’s ranking of over 3,000 global managers.
The Edinburgh-based manager, who co-manages Kames Capital’s Investment Grade Bond and Investment Grade Global Bond funds alongside Euan McNeil, who has held onto his second place ranking, climbed from position 483 to 468 in Citywire’s global table.
Mr Snowden and Mr McNeil are two of four Kames Capital managers to make it onto the list, which is based on three-year risk-adjusted performance over the period to the end of March.
Iain Wells and Douglas Scott, co-managers of Kames Capital’s UK Equity Income fund are the other two. The pair rank joint seventh in the Scottish table, having climbed from respective positions of 11 and 10 in the three years to the end of February.
The purpose of their concentrated portfolio of 51 stocks is to generate a high level of income, which is paid out to investors on a quarterly basis. However, the pair have railed against the Investment Association, which in March lowered the amount of yield that UK equity income funds must generate from 110 per cent of the index to 100 per cent.
While Galina Dimitrova, director of capital markets at the Investment Association said the change was made to “ensure that consumers and advisers have better visibility of the choice of equity income products that exceed their respective market yields”, Mr Wells said it would actually confuse the public.
“A UK equity income fund should offer a premium yield relative to the market, otherwise is it not just a UK equity fund?,” Mr Wells said.
“It makes no sense to lower the hurdle to being classed as an income fund and means that such a fund now only needs to yield as much as the market, which is a confusing message to send the wider public.
“The skew in the [FTSE] All-Share Index, and the challenge it creates for income fund managers, is well known, but it is possible to offer performance and a premium income.”
While at five Kames had the joint highest number of managers in the Scottish top 20 last month, it has been overtaken by Baillie Gifford, which also had five managers ranked last time round, in the latest listing.
Of the eight Baillie Gifford managers on the list Mark Urquhart, who runs the fund house’s Long Term Global Growth fund, is the most highly ranked, having risen from position 14 to four in the Scottish table and from number 1,947 to 709 in the global one.
He is followed in joint fifth place by fellow Baillie Gifford managers Tom Coutts and Stephen Paice, who co-run the asset manager’s European fund, and in ninth place by Baillie Gifford Managed manager Iain McCombie, who topped the Scottish table for the three years to the end of January.
Mike Gush, who co-manages the Baillie Gifford Emerging Markets Growth and Baillie Gifford Greater China funds, ranked in position 13, having risen six places since the previous month.
They were joined in the table by three Baillie Gifford new entrants: Emerging Markets Leading Companies manager Will Sutcliffe, Japanese and Japanese Income Growth manager Matthew Brett and Emerging Markets Growth co-manager Richard Sneller. They ranked 12th, 18th and 19th respectively.
There were no female managers in the March table after Kames Capital’s Elaine Morgan, who manages the house’s UK Smaller Companies Fund, and Aberdeen Asset Management’s Fiona Gillespie, who co-manages the group’s Multi-Asset Fund, dropped out.
Ms Gillespie was the only woman in the January list but was joined by Ms Morgan in February, when the latter entered the Scottish league table at number 20 as a result of climbing to position 2,601 in the global table.
Standard Life’s David Cumming, who has left the firm after it announced that it is to merge with Aberdeen Asset Management, has also dropped out of the table.
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