Walker will continue to managed the £167m Martin Currie Global Portfolio trust, alongside a number of segregated mandates. The group says: "With recent changes to the market driven by the Retail Distribution Review and AIFMD, investment trusts are once again returning to the fore. Coupled with this is Martin Currie’s belief that investors will continue to move assets from narrow UK-orientated funds to more diversified global offerings we therefore wish Tom to focus more in this area."
The difference in performance between the two funds is marked. Having once been hailed as one of the star fund managers of the North American sector for his consistent long-term outperformance of the benchmark, Walker’s performance in recent years has been weak. The fund has underperformed the wider sector in every one of the past five calendar years, with the exception of 2010. Cumulatively, the effect has been severe, with the fund lying 80th out of 88 funds in the sector over three years. Shorter-term performance is better, but still below the wider sector.
In contrast, performance on the Global Portfolio Trust has been relatively strong. He has managed the trust for over a decade and it is top quartile over three years, having delivered an NAV return of 40.4% against the AIC Global Growth sector average of 34.1%. The trust did particularly well in 2011, when it delivered a positive NAV return, while the average fund in the sector dipped 8.3%.
The group said that Kyle will now assume full responsibility for the North American fund, supported by investment manager Edward Wotherspoon, who has been with the group since 2009. Kyle joined Martin Currie from a sovereign wealth fund, where she had been head of US equities. Prior to that, she was head of North American equities at Morley Fund Management.