Royal London topped the list in pure performance terms with average five year outperformance of its bond funds at 9.57%, followed by Insight at 6.27% and Invesco at 5.04%.
FundCalibre noted that its work highlighted the difficulty investors face when comparing bond fund performance, with the various IA sectors which funds can fall into muddying the waters.
Due to ‘a lack of available information there is no easy way for a retail investor to determine the best-performing bond funds’ according to the ratings service, and there is a need for the existing IA bond sectors to be re-thought, it said.
On a risk-adjusted basis, Kames Capital came out on top with all five of its bond funds outperforming the sub-sector Sharpe Ratio average, followed by Royal London which had 85.7% outperforming on this basis and Aviva which had 75%.
The highest Sharpe Ratios and therefore the best risk-adjusted performance over the past five years, were in the Strategic Bond sub-sector with an average Sharpe Ratio of 1.39, while the worst were found in the Emerging Markets Local Currency sub sector which had an average Sharpe Ratio -0.21.
The initiative from Chelsea Financial Services through its FundCalibre service follows the launch of a provider rating system for equities funds earlier this year.
