HEAD-TO-HEAD: Blackrock versus Invesco

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Source: FE Fundinfo. Three-year cumulative returns in US dollars.

Performance

 Both funds’ performance has inevitably been shaken by the recent turmoil in global stock markets.

The Blackrock fund has posted a -18.82% three-year cumulative loss, which is less than the sector average (-23.67%), but worse than its benchmark (-13.54%), according to FE Fundinfo.

It is especially unfortunate, because as McDermott pointed out, “the fund has beaten its benchmark in three of the past five calendar years”.

“It suffered its [previous] biggest fall in 2018, when the fund dropped 12.96% [in US dollar terms] and its strongest year of outperformance relative to the MSCI Europe index came in 2015 when it returned 15.52% [in US dollar terms] compared with 8.22% for the benchmark,” he noted – although in euro terms (the base currency of the Blackrock and the Invesco products), both the fund and the index experienced losses that year.

Also benchmarked against the MSCI Europe index, the Invesco fund was launched in 2006.

The damage to its performance from the recent sell-off in European markets has been even greater than to the Blackrock fund’s returns. It is down 37.18% over the past three years, according to FE Fundinfo.

Yet, its earlier performance had also been underwhelming.

“The fund has only outperformed the benchmark in one of the past five calendar years, when it posted a better return in 2015,” said McDermott.

Apart from that year, the fund has also underperformed it’s the average calendar returns of its 63 peers, according to FE Fundinfo.

Discrete annual performance

 Source: FE Fundinfo. Annual returns in US dollars.

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