Best and worst funds for every sector in 2024
As momentum investors, Saltydog focus on identifying market trends by analysing the relative performance of fund sectors.
13th January 2025 14:26
by Douglas Chadwick from ii contributor
This content is provided by Saltydog Investor. It is a third-party supplier and not part of interactive investor. It is provided for information only and does not constitute a personal recommendation.
At Saltydog Investor, we analyse the performance of a wide range of funds. Each week, we provide our members with reports highlighting the best-performing sectors, along with a shortlist of the leading funds in each sector. We also run a couple of demonstration portfolios, which show what we are doing with some of our own money.
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We do not guarantee that we include all funds, but we certainly cover most UK-domiciled funds available through the most popular fund supermarkets.
The funds are initially sorted into their Investment Association (IA) sectors, which we then combine to form our own Saltydog Groups. The grouping is determined by the historic volatility of the sectors. The least volatile sectors are in the “Safe Haven” group. Then there is the “Slow Ahead” group, followed by “Steady As She Goes”, and finally the two “Full Steam Ahead” groups. We report on the Specialist sectors separately.
These groups can be used to help manage the overall volatility of a balanced portfolio.
As momentum investors, we focus on identifying market trends by analysing the relative performance of the sectors. We believe that these reflect the underlying macroeconomic conditions around the world.
- The best and worst-performing funds in 2024
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Because our primary focus is on sectors, and we only ever look at the leading funds, it is easy to lose sight of the variance in performance of the funds within each sector. We have gone through our analysis for last year and picked out the best and worst fund for each sector, the results are shown in the table below.
(*There are some bond sectors where we track only one or two funds so we have combined all the non-UK bond sectors into our Global & Global Emerging Market Bonds sector). Past performance is not a guide to future performance. Data source: Morningstar
The “Safe Haven” group contains only two sectors, Short Term Money Market and Standard Money Market. There are very strict rules determining what they can invest in, which means the performance of all the funds is usually fairly similar. Last year, the best-performing funds in this group went up by 5.3%, while the worst still made 5.1%.
There was much more variance in the “Slow Ahead” group. The Artemis Monthly Distribution fund, from the Mixed Investment 20-60% Shares sector, generated the highest annual return, gaining 15.7%. The worst-performing fund in this group was Allianz Strategic Bond C Inc fund, which lost 6.0%.
The leading fund in the “Steady As She Goes” group was another Artemis fund, Artemis UK Select I Acc, from the UK All Companies Sector; it ended the year up 25.3%. Rather ironically, the worst-performing fund in the UK All Companies sector was Unicorn Outstanding British Companies, which fell by -1.6%. Some of the funds from the other sectors in this Group suffered much larger losses. The M&G Property Portfolio GBP fund dropped by -13.4%.
The largest variance within a sector was in the global sector in our “Full Steam Ahead – Developed Group”. The best fund, L&G Global 100 Index I Acc, rose by 29.4%, while the worst, Baillie Gifford Global Discovery, fell by 8.4%. The top fund in this group was TM Natixis Loomis Sayles US Equity Leaders, up 37.2%, from the North America sector.
The L&G Global Technology Index I Acc fund, from the Technology and Technology Innovation sector in our “Full Steam Ahead - Emerging Group”, did even better. It was the best-performing fund from any group posting an annual return of 37.7%.
The worst-performing fund was abrdn Latin American Equity I Acc, from the Latin America sector, with an annual loss of 27.9%.
The top-performing funds will be familiar to our members. They have regularly appeared in our weekly shortlists, and some still feature in our demonstration portfolios.
For more information about Saltydog, or to take the two-month free trial, go to www.saltydoginvestor.com
These articles are provided for information purposes only. Occasionally, an opinion about whether to buy or sell a specific investment may be provided by third parties. The content is not intended to be a personal recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument or product, or to adopt any investment strategy as it is not provided based on an assessment of your investing knowledge and experience, your financial situation or your investment objectives. The value of your investments, and the income derived from them, may go down as well as up. You may not get back all the money that you invest. The investments referred to in this article may not be suitable for all investors, and if in doubt, an investor should seek advice from a qualified investment adviser.
Full performance can be found on the company or index summary page on the interactive investor website. Simply click on the company's or index name highlighted in the article.