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Anthony Bolton has now stepped back from full-time fund management and become an eminence grise at Fidelity. Recently, he held a press lunch to give us his views on the wider market and investment issues in general. Having made some big calls on the market in the past, he was less forthright this time round, remarking he thought the low would probably be reached later this year and that financials have probably been oversold.

But I tried to ask him about the way, King Lear-like, that his empire had been divided into three – the European, Special Situations and Global Special Situations funds. (For the sake of full disclosure, I have holdings in all of them). If he only had one fund to choose, which would he pick?

He opted for the global fund, on the grounds that the old geographical distinctions are breaking down. The UK market, with its Kazakh copper groups and Mexican silver miners, no longer represents the British economy. Nor does it seem sensible for the market’s sectoral biases (long oil, banks and mining, short technology) to be replicated in an individual’s portfolio.

But if you are going global, what kind of fund will you get? I had a look at the factsheets of the funds that made the shortlist for the Morningstar awards – Aberdeen Global World Equity, Sarasin Equisar Global Thematic and JPMorgan Global Select Equity.

What was striking is global funds have much more diverse portfolios than their UK rivals. Look at the top five holdings of most UK funds and you will find the usual suspects cropping up. Only one stock – E.on, the German utility – cropped up more than once in the top five of these three funds. Aberdeen’s largest holding was Petrobras, the Brazilian energy group; Sarasin’s was Exelon, a US nuclear energy group; whereas E.on was favoured by JPMorgan. Other favoured companies included Daikin, a Japanese manufacturer, Societe Generale, the French bank and CSL, an Australian pharmaceuticals group.

One also gets an intriguing mix of geographical exposures. The JPMorgan fund had 38.6 per cent of its portfolio in the US, Aberdeen just 18.4 per cent. Aberdeen had nearly 30 per cent of its fund in continental Europe, Sarasin just over 20 per cent.

Buying into these funds, therefore, gives you a very diverse exposure. This can be viewed as a good thing - active managers are more likely to outperform if they have a wide universe to pick from. Or it can be viewed as a bad thing; the range of performance is likely to be wider and thus the specific risk of picking an individual fund is much greater. That would be a reason for picking a global exchange-traded fund, such as the one that tracks the MSCI World index.

Whether you pick two or three active global funds, or a single ETF, there is another potential advantage I have mentioned before in this column - exposure to non-sterling assets. The pound has already declined by more than 6 per cent (at the time of writing) on a trade-weighted basis this year. With confidence in the British economy crumbling (especially given recent inflation data), it is not inconceivable that the fall could accelerate, particularly against the dollar.

One final advantage of global funds is scale. It is a well-known problem that it is much easier for an active manager to perform with a smallish fund than it is when the fund becomes large and starts to resemble the market. But the global stock market is so huge that even a fund with $100bn (£51bn) of assets would have plenty of scope to go its own way. (The second-largest holding in Fidelity Global Special Situations, with more than $5bn of assets, is a Turkish bank.)

It means, as usual, Mr Bolton is right - going global is the way to go.