IMA

COMMENT

FUND MANAGER FOCUS

Aberdeen's head of emerging market debt has halved currency exposure in his fund after emerging currencies failed to deliver the returns he expected in 2013.

UK investors put the most money into Absolute Return funds for over four years in January, as retail investors re-evaluated their equity exposure.

FUND MANAGER FOCUS

PASSIVE INVESTING

Some of the UK's largest fund houses are shifting focus to concentrate on ongoing charges after Invesco Perpetual became the first group to ditch annual management charges (AMCs) altogether.

A concentration of flows among an increasingly small pool of funds is prompting buyers to turn away from the biggest players due to fears over performance, liquidity and communication.

Investment Management Association (IMA) chief executive Daniel Godfrey says we should "interrogate quite hard" the assertion that the price of fund management has dropped elsewhere in the world, but not in the UK.

New entrants to the UK asset management market face stiff competition from established providers, but with barriers to entry falling, more and more European firms are entering the fray.