Trends in the UK’s sustainable and conventional fund market through the lens of Lipper data. How is sustainable investment responding to the birth of the UK’s SDR? Dewi John, LSEG Lipper’s Head of Research for UK and Ireland, and Leevania Naicker, Senior Customer Learning Manager at LSEG, look at the UK’s responsible investment fund flow data, alongside the general state of the UK fund market for Q3 2024, in the context of broader economic trends.

The IA Flexible Investment sector’s outperformance relative to other mixed investment classifications is linked to a systematically higher equity exposure. Mixed investment funds offer a one-stop-shop, managing your portfolio asset allocation within one fund. The Investment Association sectors provides four such sectors, each defined by their equity allocation. More equities mean more risk, and potentially more return. Flexible Investments Funds are (in theory, at least) the go-anywhere fourth sector: managers can dial their equity exposure up to 100% or down to zero. This maximises opportunity. But then, of course, it also maximises the risk if you call the market wrong.

Having largely given up on organic intelligence, investors have got all excited over its artificial offspring. As a result, the (mainly US) stocks linked to AI have raced away from the broad market this year. I’m unsure as to whether those same investors have not seen the Terminator franchise, or having done so, rather like the idea of the future it portrays. But who am I to argue? What is clear, however, is the narrow base of this rally. My colleague at Starmine, Tajinder Dhillon, did an elegant analyses of this recently, which is summarised below. Top-heavy returns By the

The Lipper Options Arbitrage/Strategies Funds classification are funds that employ various strategies to capture the spread between similar options through inefficiencies in the market or funds and use portfolio strategies where the manager focuses on options to generate the bulk of the portfolio’s return. The Lipper Leaders Rating System is a toolkit that helps guide investors and their advisors in selecting funds that suit individual investment styles and goals. According to LSEG Lipper, “Each fund is ranked against its peers based on the metric used (such as its flagship risk-adjusted return measure, Consistent Return, Total Return, or Expense), and the

The FTSE 100 has outperformed counterparts so far this year – but Refinitiv’s Dewi John told Reuters that investors need to be careful as the Bank of England raised fears of stagflation. This video originally appeared on Reuters TV: Sectors UpClose on 5 May 2022.