High income funds ‘most searched’ in 1H

The research firm revealed the Allianz Income and Growth Fund and the Dynamic Asian High Yield Bond Fund were the most searched products in its database during the first half. The firm did not disclose the rest of the list.

The Luxembourg-domiciled Income and Growth Fund, managed by Doug Forsyth, belongs to the international mixed-assets category on FE Analytics. It invests in equity, convertible bonds and high yield bonds with each category taking up roughly one-third of assets, according to the fund factsheet.

The fund had AUM of $27.28bn at the end of June, up 26% since the beginning of 2018. The year-to-date fund return is 4.88% in US dollar terms, outperforming the -2.32% return by other similar funds available for sale in Hong Kong.

The Dynamic Asian High Yield Bond Fund is managed by Mark Tay and takes the JP Morgan Asia Credit Index as its benchmark. Its year-to-date return was -5.68%, which is compared to -0.72% of other high yield fixed income funds.

“In fact, strategies offering high income remained in vogue for investors under the current interest rate environment and this group pretty much dominated the top 10 most researched funds over this period,” Michael Li, head of Asia at FE, said in a statement.

Up and down popularity

In terms of growing popularity, the firm found more users searched for funds investing in North America equity, with products managed by NB, Morgan Stanley and Janus Henderson seeing the largest first half increases in searches.

On the flipside, the firm said there was a noteworthy decrease in searches for Greater China or China equity funds, such as the Value Partners Classic Fund, the Templeton China Opportunities and the Da Cheng Overseas China Concept.

The search results partially reflect the year-to-date performance of the categories. The China equity category returned -8.32% on average and was among the worst performing sectors.

All data is for funds within the SFC authorised universe for 1H 2018 compared against 2H 2017 using analytics market intel data, which indicates what fund clients are researching on the FE Analytics platform.

Funds gaining popularity in 2018 1H

Funds losing popularity during 2018 1H

Source: FE