Not long ago Asset Allocator looked at DFMs’ degree of crowding around different equity regions.
Our analysis found European equities lead the line as the most concentrated region among our allocators, crammed into just seven funds.
Among these are two key BlackRock offerings: European Dynamic and Continental European.
The former is owned by nine allocators and the latter by seven.
But the two funds have been on the receiving end of some rather stout outflows of late.
Since the start of 2022, BlackRock European Dynamic has seen more than £1.8bn of outflows, data from Morningstar Direct shows.
This fund was around £6.5bn in size at the turn of 2022 and is now around £4bn in size.
Similarly, investors have pulled more than £250mn from BlackRock Continental European through the same period.
This fund has held up better: it was about £1.2bn in size at the start of 2022 and is now about £1.1bn in size.
In these straitened times, having an outflow of "just" £250mn in a couple of years from an equity asset class will only get you serenaded with a very small violin indeed.
But these are the highest outflows from any of BlackRock's UK domiciled active funds over that time period, according to Morningstar.
But we decided to have a peek at the performance figures for both funds, and in truth they offer little insight into why the outflows have been so severe.
European Dynamic has had a mixed, but not necessarily dreadful, time of it, delivering second-quartile returns over one year and third-quartile returns over three.
Whereas Continental European has delivered top-quartile returns over one, three, and five years, indicating a rare show of consistent outperformance.
Outflows from the two may also reflect the wider sentiment surrounding European equities, which, if the allocators we surveyed are anything to go by, has taken a dive lately.
DFM optimism on European equities has soured somewhat in the four months since we last examined it, with 45 per cent of those questioned expressed negativity about the region going into 2024.
