SLI’s Hambi trims exposure to UK gilts

Mr Hambi, who runs the group’s MyFolio range of multi-manager vehicles, has also reduced his exposure to Japanese equities and increased corporate debt exposure, including high yield.

UK gilts and inflation-linked gilts are now 2 per cent underweight, which is the largest underweight to a single sector in the funds.

At the same time, Mr Hambi has moved from a neutral weighting in emerging market equities to 0.5 percentage points overweight.

The manager has added to his holding in the Aberdeen Emerging Markets fund, run by Devan Kaloo and sold out of the Baring Emerging Markets fund, run by Roberto Lampl.

The fund has also moved slightly overweight, from neutral, in commercial property after adding to the SLI UK Property fund. Mr Hambi said he has reduced the M&G Property fund.

“With the SLI fund we took advantage of the fact the vehicle moved from an offer to a bid basis,” he said.

“When I bought it the fund had fallen 5 per cent so I was buying property assets 5 per cent cheaper than they are currently, given they have gone back to an offer basis now.”

Mr Hambi has also increased his exposure to the US by adding to the Vanguard US Equity index fund. However, he has reduced exposure to the £1.7bn Threadneedle American Select fund run by Cormac Weldon.

Elsewhere, Mr Hambi said that following “a lot of requests” from advisers the group had its funds mapped against the third-party risk-rating provider Distribution Technology in March.

SLI’s MyFolio funds are risk-rated from one to five which Mr Hambi said corresponds to Distribution Technology’s 3-7 ratings within its spectrum of ratings 1-10.

“There has been a lot of work to make sure this was correct,” he said.

.