Franklin's Bullas: How finding small-cap sweet spot helped performance in 2015

Richard Bullas, who co-manages the £193m Franklin UK Smaller Companies fund with Paul Spencer, said performance this year has been driven by companies at the bottom of the small-cap spectrum, but above the micro-cap space.

The manager said companies with a market cap of between £150m and £300m are often too small for larger small-cap funds and too big for micro-cap strategies. "The big thing for us this year has been moving down the market-cap spectrum as valuations look better the further down you go, and we have been tilting the portfolio to take advantage of these opportunities," he said. Can small caps maintain outperformance over large caps? "For us, anything below £100m is a specialist area which we stay away from as you have to take a significant stake in the company to have any kind of meanin...