BAILLIE Gifford’s Iain McCombie rocketed to the top of The Herald’s league table of Scottish fund managers last month after climbing 572 places in Citywire’s ranking of over 3,000 global managers.
Mr McCombie, who runs the Baillie Gifford Managed Fund alongside Steven Hay and is AA rated by financial information group Citywire, overtook Kames Capital’s Stephen Snowden and Euan McNeil to achieve the accolade.
The rankings are based on risk-adjusted performance over a three-year period, with the latest table covering the three years to the end of January.
Katharine Aram-Dixon, head of fund manager research at Citywire, said that Mr McCombie had been able to climb from position 1,049 to 477 in the global table because the latest figures no longer take account of January 2014, a month in which the fund underperformed its benchmark.
“It was down to the loss of a bad month at the beginning of the period and a really good month at the end of the period that pushed up his Citywire manager ratio and enabled him to climb up the ranks of the Citywire Ratings,” Ms Aram-Dixon said.
“The month that was lost at the beginning of the three-year period under analysis - to January 31, 2014 - was a month where the Baillie Gifford Managed Fund underperformed the benchmark with a return of -2.95 per cent versus the benchmark’s return of -2.14 per cent.
“In the month that was gained at the end of the period - to January 31, 2017 - the fund outperformed the benchmark by over 2.5 per cent.”
The fund, which as a member of the Investment Association’s Mixed Investment 40 per cent - 85 per cent Shares Sector is required to invest in a range of different asset classes, had almost three quarters of its cash invested in equities at the end of January. A further 11 per cent was held in UK bonds, 10 per cent in overseas bonds and seven per cent in cash.
The UK, North America and Continental Europe were its largest geographic exposures, with Amazon, Royal Dutch Shell and Prudential all featuring in its top ten holdings.
Although Mr McCombie’s rise up the table was meteoric, his Baillie Gifford colleagues Malcolm MacColl, Charles Plowden and Spencer Adair each rose more than 700 places in Citywire’s global table to rank 14th and joint 15th in the Scottish table.
Even those rises paled in comparison to that of Aberdeen Asset Management’s Fiona Gillespie, manager of the fund house’s Multi-Asset Fund and the only woman to feature in the Scottish top 20. She climbed over 2,000 places in the global ranking between December and January.
A business studies graduate of Edinburgh Napier University, Ms Gillespie, who is plus rated by Citywire, climbed from position 4,240 in the global rankings in the three years to the end of December to 2,207 at the end of January.
Having started her career at Edinburgh Fund Managers, Ms Gillespie joined Aberdeen in 2003 when it acquired Edinburgh. She co-manages the Multi-Asset Fund alongside Michael Turner, with the pair investing in stocks, bonds and a range of Aberdeen’s other funds.
At the end of January the Aberdeen European Equity Enhanced Index fund, which tracks the MSCI Europe ex UK index, was its largest holding, accounting for five per cent of total assets.
The Multi-Asset Fund is benchmarked against a basket of indices including the FTSE All-Share, the MSCI World ex UK and the FTSE Small Cap and, in the three years to the end of January, underperformed the benchmark by three percentage points. During the three years the fund grew by 6.69 per cent while the benchmark grew by 9.69 per cent.
In their factsheet for January the managers said that they switched half their hedged Japanese equity position into an unhedged share class in addition to trimming the fund’s position in the Funding Circle SME Income Fund, an investment trust that lent the money it raised at its initial fundraising via the Funding Circle peer-to-peer platform.
Standard Life’s David Cumming, who is leaving the fund manager due to its merger with Aberdeen, ranked ninth in the Scottish list and 1,139th in the global one.
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