Two-thirds of the asset manager’s outflows in March came out of bond funds with a further €540m (£456m) pulled from its equity funds, according to the latest Morningstar data, with Le Saout’s former funds seeing the highest redemptions.
Le Saout quit the firm in December along with Ali Chabaane, head of portfolio construction, after both were previously suspended by Pioneer for trying to form a competing asset management business.
Ali Masarwah, Morningstar’s director for EMEA editorial research said: “It should come as no surprise that the funds previously managed by Tanguy Le Saout, who exited the company in December, were among those with the highest outflows for the year to date.”
Other “laggards” in the Morningstar European flows data included AXA, which suffered losses from its US-dollar high-yield bond funds, and Fidelity who saw withdrawals hit more than €800m in March.
However, invesment manager Pimco enjoyed “immense inflows” into its GIS Income Fund so far in 2017 with investors ploughing an extra €15.3bn into it over the past 12 months, making up 80% of all Pimco inflows for the year.
The Templeton Global Return Fund, run by Michael Hasenstab, saw inflows of €68m in March signalling the first month of positive flows for the fund since December 2014.
Ali Masarwah, EMEA editorial director for Morningstar, said overall the March flow data showed investors’ preference for higher-yielding fixed-income assets due to low interest rates.
He added: “March also brought a setback for actively managed equity funds in Europe. After enjoying inflows in the first two months of the year, flows to active funds were back in the red in March, dashing industry hopes of a substantial turn-around in the first quarter.
“On a broad category level, open-end equity funds were virtually flat in March as inflows into open-end index funds equalized outflows from actively managed funds.
“Overall, equity index funds continued to thrive as equity ETFs, which are not part of our open-end data, enjoyed additional inflows of €6.2bn.”
