Using the Lipper Leaders scoring system to analyse the best-performing funds in the IA Global sector.
There’s a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen’s character, amid the chaos of battle in a beleaguered US military outpost, asks a GI, “Who’s in charge?”. The GI looks at him askance, and retorts, “Ain’t you?”.
Maybe I’m being overdramatic, but trying to determine the leadership in global equity markets feels a little like this, as US mega caps relinquish the role they have largely held for the past decade.
A year ago, I flagged the increasing weight of the US in global indices as a potential risk. In July 2025, the country had a weighting of almost 64% of the FTSE All-World index. But in 2024, the US was the best performing major market. However, year to date, the US has lagged the global index, being overtaken by, among others, Europe, the UK, and emerging markets. That has not automatically hit individual fund returns, as a number of Global sector leaders over 12 months still have considerable US exposure—indeed the leader has 75% US exposure—but, in the round, it will be acting as a drag on the performance of funds with high US weightings. US small and mid-caps have particularly suffered over the year.
On the other hand, Chinese equities, dismissed by many as “uninvestable”, have had a strong if volatile year. There’s also a certain poetic symmetry, given my creaky Apocalypse Now metaphor, that Vietnamese equities are shooting the lights out, having rallied hard since June—something my colleague Xav Feng delves into greater detail on here.
There has also been something of a churn of industrial sector rankings. This time last year, IA Global’s leadership was dominated by energy-heavy funds. This year, six out of the top 10 funds over three years are gold, information technology, and finance. This is a little odd, because the Investment Association has sectors for commodities and natural resources, tech, and finance.
I’m assuming that if you want these sorts of specialist funds, you would look in the relevant IA sectors, so I have stripped them out. What remains is a group of funds that are diversified by geography and sector. All are classified as Equity Global by LSEG Lipper. The inclusion of Polar Capital Artificial Intelligence may raise an eyebrow, but it is diversified across numerous industrial sectors, and is benchmarked to the MSCI All-Country World index.
Given this rotation of leadership, some change in the sector’s top funds is to be expected, and that has been the case. Only one fund has retained its place: Ranmore Global Equity. It’s also the only fund in the table with a value tilt. Although it lagged last year, it strongly outperformed over 2022 (where it returned 14.7%, when its MSCI World index benchmark fell 7.4%), 2023, and over the first eight months of this year, when it returned 23.98% against the benchmark’s 5.79%. It has a very different look to the index: for example, its US weighting is 20.53%, which will have helped this year. While Ranmore’s benchmark is a developed market index, the fund itself has significant emerging market exposure: China, last year its second largest weighting, is now the fifth largest. At 8.05%, that’s still roughly three-times that of the All-World index weight. While, unfortunately for my opening reference, there is no Vietnam in the portfolio, in July the fund did have 0.12% in Cambodia.
The managers are clearly very active, and the fund has a Lipper Leaders Consistent Return score of 5—the highest. In July, its largest holding was cash and equivalents, at 12.47%, which has been built up over the course of the year. Information technology, on the other hand, is its smallest sector weight, although this has long been the case. The fund’s August factsheet indicates a growing interest in small caps—a contrarian stance, given the multi-year dominance of mega caps, from the FAANGs to Mag7.
Finally, I never make recommendations. But I will break the rule just this once: if you haven’t seen Apocalypse Now, you really should.
Table 1: Top-Performing Global Funds Over Three Years (with a minimum five-year history)
All data as of August 31, 2025; Calculations in GBP
Source: LSEG Lipper
This article was first published in the October edition of Moneyfacts, p27.
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