The folks running Quilter's Cirilium portfolios for the past year or so have been busy putting their own stamp on what is one of the biggest pots of money in allocator-land at around £7bn.
Ian Jensen-Humphreys and Sacha Chorley were in-house promotions to run the portfolios in 2023, and among their most significant acts to date has been to reduce small cap exposure.
The team has dropped a number of funds with an ESG bent, including Jupiter Global Sustainable Equity, R&M Global Sustainable Opportunities, and Premier Miton European Sustainable Leaders.
Readers might notice that all of these funds have a sustainable bent.
We got in touch with Chorley, who said this is more down to the underlying cap exposures than a debate around sustainability per se.
“A key factor in the trades was that the equity holdings had more growth and small cap exposure than we wanted,” he said.
“Many of the sustainable strategies that were in Cirilium when we took on management of the portfolios naturally had more of a tilt to those parts of the market and hence were candidates for removal.
"However, as part of our activity we also removed other, non-ESG linked growth funds like the Allspring US Select, and the Polar Automation & AI fund for similar reasons.”
Having said that, the Quilter folk said exiting the Jupiter Global Sustainable Equity fund allowed them to re-deploy the cash into fund which do not have their investment universe restricted because of dual sustainability and financial objectives.
The same reasoning was given for exiting Premier Miton European Sustainable Leaders – its sustainability lens was thought to limit the scope and was deemed unnecessary for the Cirilium portfolios.
One thing that hasn't change under the new regime is the chunky allocation to cash, albeit the 14 per cent level in its balanced portfolio as of the end of Q3 2023 is 5 points below its level a year ago.
