Foreign & Colonial, the oldest and one of the largest investment trusts, has spent recent years reducing its exposure to UK equities to reflect its global equity mandate.
In 2013, it established ‘global income’ and ‘global funds’ sub-portfolios, which took up a combined 10 per cent of the portfolio and were established largely at the expense of UK equities.
But the UK equity portion of the trust is still 21 per cent, higher than the UK’s 8 per cent weighting in its benchmark, the FTSE All-World index.
The trust is therefore looking to create a ‘global multi-manager’ sub-portfolio, which will be managed by F&C’s Mr Potter and Mr Burdett and will take up between 9 per cent and 10 per cent of the assets of the trust.
This will mostly come out of the UK equities portion of the trust, which is set to be reduced to 10 per cent.
Mr Burdett said the portfolio would consist of roughly 25 funds which he and Mr Potter already use in their multi-manager mandates but that it would not be a copy one of their existing products.
The news of the new mandate comes as the long-serving manager of the trust, Jeremy Tigue, announced that he is going to retire on July 1, after 17 years at the helm and 33 years at F&C. Colleague Paul Niven will take on the trust.
