What's different about the Specialist group

The specialist sector is a bit of an odd ball! This is where all the funds which don’t naturally fit into another sector end up and so, not surprisingly, is something of a mixed bag.

We consider it ‘high risk’, because most of the funds have the same level of volatility that you would associate with the ‘Full Steam Ahead’ Groups, but this is not always the case.

Whilst we calculate a group average, it can be an unfair comparison with the other Groups, as there are nearly always funds doing well in this sector, but they might not be the ones that were doing well last month.

Funds in this group have the potential for some very high returns but because they may have a very particular range of investments specific to one industry or type of asset then they invariably carry a high level of risk.

As the Specialist sector can include such a wide varied range of investment funds it is important that you do not compare them all together. For example it would be unadvisable to consider a Gold fund as a comparable investment to a healthcare fund in anything other than the high level of risk involved with both.

To help with our analysis we have created a number of SubZones where we analyse the relative performance of various funds investing in similar things. These are Agriculture, India, Latin America, Natural Resources, Russia & Eastern Europe, and Gold. In total we analyse around 65 funds in this sector, most of which do not fall within one of the SubZones.