From a year-on-year perspective corporate governance has remained an important topic for European fund managers. Only 36% of managers said fund groups should play no active role in the management of the companies in which they invest. Last March 39% felt this way.
Some 61% were planning to be more vocal at companies’ annual general meetings this year while over 70% will increase their resources over the comi
ng year to handle corporate governance issues.
Emerging favourites
Looking at the fund managers’ country preferences revealed some interesting developments this month. Emerging Europe is now the managers’ third favourite region as 19% said it would be the best performing over the next year. Asia excluding Japan, which was often in the top spot last year, has fallen to fourth with only 14%.
Europe excluding the UK was expected to be the best performer with Japan in second place. Japan also had its detractors this month as some 16% said it would be the worst performing region. America remained the managers’ least preferred part of the world with 51% expecting it to offer the worst relative returns.
About half of the survey participants said the euro would be the top performing currency while 27% chose the yen. Some 64% expected the dollar to be the weakest.
Managers came out firmly in favour of large cap companies with 62% saying they would outperform their smaller counterparts over the next 12 months. This was up from 49% in February. Only a handful said small firms would offer the best performance while a fourth were neutral.
Style picks
Sentiment on the prospects for growth companies also improved this month with twice as many favouring growth shares over value ones. Some 36% said growth would outperform compared with 18% for value firms.
All of the groups surveyed expected positive returns for global equities, as measured by the MSCI World Index in dollars. Most predicted returns between 5-10% while 27% said between 0-5%.
Morningstar’s European offices conducted the survey from March 14th-21st. Some 45 fund groups from 12 countries participated. On average they each managed €55billion (£43 billion) and offered 92 retail funds.