HEAD-TO-HEAD: Blackrock vs Jupiter

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Peter Brunt, Morningstar

Introduction 

European equities, including the UK, have been largely snubbed by investment managers.

Political risk, such as Brexit, and the rising populism in the region are dampening sentiment.

Belinda Boa, Blackrock’s Hong Kong-based head of active investments for Asia-Pacific and CIO of emerging markets for fundamental active equity, prefers US and emerging market equities over the UK and Europe due to political risk.

Stephen Tong, Hong Kong-based client portfolio manager for multi-asset solutions at Franklin Templeton Investments, shared the same sentiment:

“Brexit and the rising populism in countries like Italy and Europe are going to change how the markets in the EU interact with one another. That is something we are worrying about, so we are underweighting both the UK and European equity markets,”

Both the European and UK markets performed poorly last year relative to global equities.

The MSCI AC Europe Index and the FTSE All Share Index returned -14.22% and -14.77% respectively, which compares to the MSCI AC World Index’s -8.93% performance.

Peter Brunt, London-based research analyst for manager research at Morningstar, told FSA that generally, UK equities have lagged global markets, partly due to Brexit.

However, UK-focused fund managers have argued that the economic standing of the country is still pretty strong, according to Brunt.

“We’ve also seen managers finding better value opportunities in the UK domestic names,” he said.

Against this backdrop, FSA asked Brunt to compare two UK equity funds: the Blackrock UK Fund and the Jupiter UK Special Situations Fund.

Source: Morningstar, FE Analytics

*22 Jan 2016 – 23 Jan 2019

**23 Jan 2016 – 18 Jan 2019

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