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However, it took Mike Pinggera and Steve Waddington, co-managers of the Insight Investment Diversified Dynamic Return fund, just six weeks to get Insight’s multi-manager range aligned to their views, following the departures of Patrick Armstrong and Ana Cukic Armstrong.

That was more than a year ago, and the pair are now fully focused on ensuring the fund’s growth and performance. Mr Pinggera says the whole Insight multi-manager range has been run to his design since March 2009.

He adds: "Since then it is ahead of its benchmark in an environment where it has benefited from significant rallies in the equity markets and all risk assets. We're still seeing opportunities and capturing them even though the market’s coming back, so we’re still on target to deliver the fund's objectives."

Compared to its benchmark – the three-month London Interbank Bid (Libid) rate – the fund has consistently and significantly outperformed, producing a return of 25.7 per cent over the year to April 30, according to the fund’s factsheet. Mr Pinggera says he also looks to beat Libor plus 6 per cent – this is arguably a fairly straightforward task, with the three-month sterling Libor rate at 0.73 per cent as of June 15. At the height of the banking crisis on September 30, 2008, it peaked at 6.3 per cent.

Mr Pinggera, who acknowledges that he is "not the most aggressive manager", says: "We will not take excessive risk within the fund just because our peer group is. There are lots of funds running with a full equity allocation, [but] we don’t believe we need to do that in order to hit our objectives over the cycle."

This stance has been reflected in the pair's recent decision to cut the fund's equity exposure drastically from 54.9 per cent, as at April 30, to 32.4 per cent by May 31. Although this has led to a positive 12-month performance with the fund producing returns of 11.2 per cent in the year to June 7, it is still languishing in the bottom quartile of the IMA Active Managed sector.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Mr Pinggera is adamant that his disciplined strategy will protect on the downside. The fund’s three-year performance – down 23.6 per cent – is also among the worst figures in the sector, but as this incorporates the change of manager, it is unlikely to be a full picture of his and Mr Waddington’s performance.

The main asset class to gain from the move away from equities is fixed income, which Mr Pinggera says reflects a wider growth in interest in this area. He adds that they are keen to "increase investments in positions that can grind out returns in volatile and potentially sideways markets".

"We are looking for things that are either supported by very strong managers or structurally more defensive than the traditional route," he says. "With that in mind, there are three funds we have taken up positions in: the Axa Short Duration US High Yield Bond fund, the Harbourvest Senior Loans fund, and very recently the Neuberger Berman Distressed Debt fund."

Mr Pinggera admits these funds, as well as many others in other asset classes, are "not necessarily run of the mill plays". This is in part down to the duo's thematic approach, which focuses on global themes such as agricultural commodities, environmental technologies and healthcare. As a multi-manager fund this means holding positions in specialist funds such as the Impax Environmental Markets, DWS Global Agri Business and Fidelity Global Healthcare funds.

Mr Waddington says: "These are sectors which can perform irrespective of market direction: this quarter the environmental technologies is up about 5.5 per cent, healthcare is up about 2 per cent, and agricultural commodities up about 6.5 per cent."

The small cap sector is also of interest, he adds, as there are "plenty of opportunities" for some small companies to grow as global markets recover from the recession. Particularly of interest are those firms which can generate cash and access funding at a time when liquidity is still hard to come by.

"In that [illiquid] environment it’s very good to have an active strategy to capture the opportunity, and we have the Baring European Select fund to capture it," Mr Waddington says. "Markets have been off, but that fund is up 6 per cent quarter to date."

The fund's real estate exposure has more than doubled from 2.9 per cent at the end of April to 6.5 per cent at the end of May, largely down to a decision to buy back into the iShares EPRA/NAREIT UK Property exchange traded fund, rather than the less flexible unit trusts or Oeics. It is a position which was held from May until September last year, when it was sold off following a 20 per cent outperformance of the market, Mr Waddington says.

This month he bought back into the fund, selling FTSE 100 futures against it to remove market risk – a technique used across Insight’s multi-manager range to "isolate individual themes".

Annual performance figures indicate that the stormy period experienced both externally and internally at the beginning of last year, which saw the fund lose 32.9 per cent in the year to March 31 2009, is now well behind its two managers.