His departure coincides with a number of changes BlackRock has made to its UK equity offering for retail investors.
Nick Little, who stepped up to take the mantle of the BlackRock UK Fund from Lyttleton back in February last year, will also take over management of the BlackRock UK Dynamic Fund. The firm is planning to merge the two funds together, subject to unit holder and regulatory approval.
If existing holders of the UK Dynamic Fund wish to stay in a fund within the IMA UK all Companies Sector, they will be able to switch into BlackRock’s UK Focus Fund or UK Special Situations funds without incurring any charges.
BlackRock’s UK Absolute Alpha Fund will be co-managed by Nigel Ridge and Nick Osborne. Ridge has been at BlackRock since 2004 and has managed the BlackRock UK Equity Hedge Fund long/short strategy since 2005.
Fall from glory
The UK Absolute Alpha Fund was one of the original funds in the absolute return space, launched in 2005. It had a very strong performance in its first few years with Lyttleton running it, but in 2008 Nick Osborne was added as co-manager, having worked with Lyttleton since launch.
Lyttleton wrote to investors in February last year to apologise for a poor 2011 at the helm of the fund, which he said was down to “picking the wrong shares”. In the calendar year 2011, the fund lost 7.06%, according to Morningstar. The fund’s latest factsheet shows it returned just 0.5% last year, although this at least took it back into positive territory.
In June last year Lyttleton took a three-month absence of leave to resolve family issues and left the running of his funds to their co-managers – Ridge and Osborne.
BlackRock was keen to emphasise at the time that Lyttleton would be coming back and his focus would continue to be on the higher alpha strategies in the UK equity team.
But there were suggestions from some that Lyttleton had “come off the boil” and this was the start of a “phasing out” process by BlackRock.
