We have picked up the latest edition of the Columbia Threadneedle Fund Watch. 

The compilers of the data are the long established multi-manager team led by Rob Burdett and are known for setting a notoriously high hurdle for managers to beat – rooting out the few that achieve consistently top quartile performance over three years, ending Q4 2023. 

The good news is that there’s been a marked increase in the number of outperforming funds at the end of last year, with 39 passing the test, as opposed to just six in 2022, from a total of 1,416 products examined in their Fund Watch survey. 

According to the numbercrunchers themselves, the IA Japan sector topped the league table with 12.3 per cent of its funds delivering top quartile performance. 

Kelly Prior, investment manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, said Japan continues to prove a rich hunting ground for active management even as its importance in the global market continues to wane.

You may have noticed that we’ve been covering M&G Japan recently as the fund has raced ahead to become the most popular Japanese offering within the parameters of our database. 

In purely AUM terms, the fund has rocketed from £300mn in size at the turn of last year to £2.4bn now. It also helps that the fund has delivered first-quartile returns over each of the past three years, cementing its status as one of the few elusive outperformers in the Fund Watch survey. 

But last year we revealed the malchance among allocators when picking actively-managed Japanese equity funds, so the Fund Watch survey suggests there are plenty of opportunities in this market for allocators to reconsider their options.