‘Nimble’ Miton doubles up as it pulls in £1bn of savers’ money

Fund manager Miton attracted a record £1 billion from savers last year after financial advisers started to divert more cash to more “nimble” stockpickers.

The boutique firm, which is shunning the sector’s merger fever, said net inflows rose 106% from £494 million due to the strong performance of its funds.

“Financial advisers and discretionary managers who buy our funds really do like active funds that help them manage their client portfolios in performance terms, but also do something different,” said chief executive David Barron.

“You’ve got to have a model of scale where you go for very large assets and big scalable funds, or you’ve got to be more active and specialist and nimble like us.”

A savage December for the markets led to a £466 million hit to funds but the strong inflows meant assets under management were up 14.5% to £4.4 billion on 31 December.

However, the shares fell by 5.7%, or 3p, to 49.5p after analysts marked down their earnings-per-share forecasts for 2019 due to the hit from the performance losses.