By STEPHEN MARRIOTT 10/06/2008
Ed Burke, the manager of Invesco Perpetual’s UK Growth and UK Aggressive funds, is to take early retirement. Invesco Perpetual state that the manager is retiring for personal reasons, although the recent spell of poor performance on both of his funds must have been a contributing factor in his decision.
Moving early into banks in the third quarter of 2007 hurt fund performance and now UK Aggressive and UK Growth are ranked 94th and 92nd percentile respectfully over the twelve months to end of May. However, Burke’s longer term record is respectable. During his 8.9 years of managing UK retail funds he had produced average outperformance of 0.33% per month, resulting in a Bestinvest MRI score of 94.4%. As a result we were willing to give Burke the benefit of the doubt.
Burke’s departure has led to the following changes. Invesco Perpetual UK Opportunities will merge into UK Growth with Martin Walker running the combined vehicle. Meanwhile, Walker's UK Focus fund will merge into UK Aggressive, which will be managed by Stephen Anness.
We have suspended our three star buy ratings on both funds pending a meeting with the new fund managers.