TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

The year-to-date share price chart shows just how wild the ride has been for the UK-listed asset management sector in 2026.

AUM growth during Q1 was mostly negative, with many managers reporting that January and February were stronger months, but the escalating conflict in Iran made for a much weaker March.

At a company level, here are some key points (net flow and investment performance charts are shown below these bullets):

• Polar Capital: Knocked it out of the park. Huge jump in net flows to £1.4bn and very strong investment performance. Share price up c. 10% since Q1 AUM update. Its Global Technology and Artificial Intelligence funds were key contributors to flows and investment performance. But these are not index-hugging funds. The Global Technology fund returned +6.9% net in Q1 versus -7.5% for the benchmark Dow Jones Global Technology Net Total Return Index. The AI fund returned +11.1% versus -3.2% for the benchmark MSCI ACWI TR Index.

• Man Group: Strong investment performance (driven by its alternatives portfolio) but net flows turned negative (-$1.6bn) after 5 successive quarters of positive net flows. There was a redemption of $6.1bn from a single client during the quarter. So outside of that, flows look good. The market didn’t like the update though, shares fell 7% on the day.

• Schroders: Share price jumped on the announcement of a takeover by US-headquartered Nuveen (c. 30% premium to the share price on the day before the announcement). Quarterly performance was pretty good compared to others.

• Jupiter: Very strong net flows. Four quarters of positive net flows now. Very poor investment performance hit AUM though. Completed CCLA acquisition which added £15bn of AUM (total now £68.4bn).

• Ninety One: Middle-of-the-pack organic performance but Sanlam deal added £16.5bn of AUM (total now £172bn).

• Ashmore: Weak quarter. Net flows turned negative again after a very strong Q4-25. Investment performance was negative too. The share price had strong momentum until mid-Feb but has since fallen c. 20%. All eyes are on the investor rotation in emerging markets - and if this has stalled?

• Premier Miton: Heavy outflows and weak investment performance. With AUM down to £9bn, lack of scale is a real issue now. Cost cutting exercise announced. Share price down 8% on the day of the update.

• Impax: Heavy outflows in the quarter but one of only 3 asset managers to record a positive investment performance. Downgraded revenue expectations. The share price fell 25% on the announcement. Impax says investment performance has improved substantially, especially for its thematic strategies. During the quarter, 63% of AUM outperformed. And it’s hard to argue with the company statement: “Longer term, the fundamentals that underpin our investment thesis continue to strengthen, particularly in the areas of renewable energy and energy efficiency, key components of energy security, which is already a priority globally in light of the currently elevated geopolitical tension.” But its all about turning net flows around.

• Liontrust: Heavy outflows persist although not quite as bad as the last few quarters. Very weak investment performance. Announced 2 institutional mandate wins totalling £500m (not yet in AUM number). This is also all about turning net flows around.

• Mercia: While it doesn’t report full AUM details quarterly, private markets specialist Mercia Asset Management had a strong final quarter of its FY26 (ending 31 March). This from my recent Equity Development research note. “Mercia has announced it expects EBITDA to be materially above expectations... Fundraising in H2 was strong, with Q4 alone seeing £200m of new funds raised (from successful VCT and EIS raises) or proposed increases to existing mandates (both quantum and duration). Impressively, there were no redemptions in FY26.”

Here’s the comparison of net flows.

The above should also be read in the context of the net flow environment more generally, which saw UK funds suffer heavy outflows during Q1 (after a much improved Dec-25).

[Calastone measures orders from UK-based investors into funds domiciled in the UK. Note that this has nothing to do with where the underlying assets are invested].

And here is the investment performance comparison. [MSCI ACWI (GBP): -1.27%].

Subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication, and covered Impax Asset Management, Polar Capital, and Mercia Asset Management, as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on these companies by clicking on each. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Tatton Asset Management released a trading update this morning covering Q4 of its FY26. It beat my AUM forecast and looks on track to beat revenue and profit forecasts too. Current monthly net inflows are running ahead of my forecast for FY27. This looks like a well-oiled machine with exceptional momentum.

My latest Equity Development note covers the update which can be found at this link.

All of my previous research on Tatton can be found at this link. If you’re new to the story, I’d recommend reading my interim results note from November 2025 which covers the business model, market forces at work, performance versus peers, growth prospects, financial analysis and valuation.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with developments in the UK asset & wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder of Tatton Asset Management and covered Tatton Asset Management as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Tatton here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

Thanks for reading TheInvestors.blog! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Polar Capital released a trading update this morning covering Q4 of its FY26. It knocked it out of the park.

My Equity Development note covers the update which can be found at this link.

Here’s a taster:

Polar delivered an exceptional Q4-26 (Jan – Mar 26) with net inflows of +£1.44bn, following up positive net flows of +£0.15bn in Q3. This stands in stark contrast to equity funds more generally, and active equity funds especially, which suffered heavy outflows in both quarters (page 2). At the end of Q3, Polar had flagged improved client engagement and a strengthening new business pipeline. Clearly, this is now translating into stronger flows.

Despite market falls in March, quarterly investment performance was strong: +£816m (+3% of AUM). AUM ended FY26 on £30.6bn, up 43% y-o-y, well above our previous forecast of £28.4bn.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder of Polar Capital and covered Polar Capital as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Polar here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

Thanks for reading TheInvestors.blog! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This newsletter is for shareholders and potential shareholders of London-listed Asset & Wealth Managers. It offers nuggets of information that might feed into a more detailed analysis. It’s not advice! It should also be of interest to leaders of asset and wealth managers - offering a perspective of how investors are thinking about their companies, peers, and competitors.

Specialism underpins this newsletter. I stick to writing about London-listed asset and wealth managers. That’s around 20-25 companies I’ll regularly be writing about (names below), all in two closely related sectors.

Analysing these companies is my job. That analysis work hopefully means I can write this newsletter with a depth of insight that just can’t be replicated by the “skim the results and give a hot take” investment commentaries that are so widely available. If you read a post here and think “that was something I didn’t know”, or “that’s a different way of thinking about it”, then I’ve achieved my goal. All posts are free to subscribers.

Subscribe now

Typical posts include:

• Quarterly, half-yearly, and annual roundups of both sectors: most companies in this space provide quarterly assets-under-management (AUM) updates in addition to half-yearly and annual results, so there’s plenty of data to dig into.

  Example..

• Individual company deep dives and opinions on valuation. Example…

• Results commentaries. Example…

• Strategic sector developments such as the implications of acquisitions. Example…

• Pre-results commentaries. Example…

Plus a lot more.

Where I see opportunities in the companies I am analysing, I might invest in these companies too, so sometimes I do have ‘skin in the game’. I always disclose when I write about a company I am invested in.

If that sounds good to you...

And if you think The Investors Blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

On fundamentals, Pollen Street has been a top performer. Based on its Q3 trading update from Nov 25, it’s probably going to be one of, if not the strongest performers when it comes to AUM growth among London-listed asset managers. We’ll get more details when it reports 2025 results on 26th March.

Until earlier this year, it looked like the share price priced recognised this. Pollen Street was priced as a ‘winner’. In this early-Feb 26 post, I wrote…

Three asset managers are clearly priced for higher earnings growth than others: Man Group, Pollen Street, and Ashmore. There’s a case to be made that this makes sense…

… (Pollen Street, the) private equity and private credit specialist is also showing strong growth at AUM and earnings level. Its funds are attracting significant interest from investors all around the world with a Q3 trading update (to 30 Sep 25) showing AUM up 32% y-o-y. EBITDA was up 28% y-o-y in the half-year to 30 Jun 25. The share price seems to have been in a reasonably solid uptrend over the last two years or so.

Just six weeks later, that last sentence from the quote above looks very dated! Here’s the updated chart.

That fall has been during a period of virtually no news from the company (RNS’s in 2026 are mostly details of the ongoing share buyback programme and an announcement of some directorate and committee changes - nothing that you’d expect to be needle-moving).

But here’s what did happen in markets:

Private credit fund worries accumulate…

Around 37% (£2.5bn) of Pollen Street’s AUM is in private credit (senior asset-backed credit). The balance is private equity.

But a slow burn of worry around private credit and private credit funds seems to have just accumulated over recent months, and hit the shares of many players in this space - hard (see below). In the US, worries really ratcheted up in Sep and Oct 25 with the Tricolor and First Brands debacles, and Jamie Dimon’s subsequent and now-infamous “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more” comment during the JPMorganChase Q3 2025 earnings call.

Then a bunch of private credit funds restricted or looked to change the terms of withdrawals/redemptions, including funds run by Blackrock, Blue Owl, Morgan Stanley, Cliffwater, and Blackstone. This spurred more widespread worries about the quality of underlying portfolios.

Amidst all of this the problem turned into an AI-linked issue with the launch of new professional-task automation tools by Anthropic. As many private credit loans (especially in the US) have been made to software companies - which some deem to be at risk of massive disruption from AI - the consequence is supposedly a decline in the quality of many private credit portfolios.

And it really does look like London-listed Pollen Street and ICG (both with private equity and private credit funds) have been dragged down by concerns across the pond (all companies in the chart below are US-listed except POLN and ICG).

…but Pollen Street seems distant from these concerns

Pollen Street’s private credit business seems quite distant from the issues associated with portfolio quality concerns in the US. Here’s a summary of its private credit activities from a company presentation.

Not only is there a geographic distance with 90% of Pollen Street’s lending deployed in Europe (incl. the UK). But one of the key differences between Pollen Street and some of the major concerns in the US (which are often associated with loans to software and other companies), is that Pollen Street’s portfolio is largely asset-backed lending, versus corporate lending.

That means the underlying loans in Pollen Street’s portfolio are underpinned by assets which generate returns to repay loans, and these assets can be taken over by the lender and sold to recoup any losses if the borrower gets into difficulty. Corporate lending on the other hand would be relying on the performance of a business (e.g. a software company) to generate cash flow to repay a loan (although some of these loans will have collateral too).

In November 2025, Pollen Street held a Private Credit Teach In, which is an hour or so of really drilling down into the weeds of its private credit business. It’s freely available, and I would recommend any shareholder or potential shareholder watch the whole thing to improve their understanding of what Pollen Street’s private credit business really is.

AI concerns spill into Private Equity too

It’s also possible that some of Pollen Street’s share price fall from just before mid-February could have been related to AI concerns around its private equity portfolio. This portfolio has a very tight sector focus, as illustrated below (source: Pollen Street).

And some of these sectors are in the crosshairs of AI disruption worries too. This (10th Feb 26) Bloomberg article - Wealth Manager Stocks Sink as Traders Flee Next AI Casualty - sums it up:

An artificial intelligence tool aimed at creating tax strategies sparked a selloff in wealth-management stocks Tuesday as investors fear the business could be at risk from automated advice.

The innovation puts the wealth-management industry in the crosshairs of AI competition, the way it did for software stocks and private credit firms last week and insurance brokerage shares on Monday.

But this story and some of the market moves around it seem very much based on “narrative contagion”, where the share prices of companies in specific sectors get hit because of AI concerns - often when a new AI sector-specific tool is released.

These moves look panicky and without deep fundamentals-based research, but they are more than blips. For example, at time of writing, UK wealth manager St James’s Place had only recovered 6% of the 20% fall which took place between 10 and 16 Feb 26.

Iran war muddies picture further

Of course, on top of some of these sector-specific reasons for Pollen Street’s share price fall, is the broader market turbulence brought about by the war in Iran and its fallout.

We just don’t know how this will impact Pollen Street yet.

What I do expect though, is for the results commentary and presentation on 26th March 2026 to shed some light on exactly where Pollen Street stands in relation to some of these widespread market concerns, and if it can shrug off narrative contagion. I’ll be writing about those results, so be sure to subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to TheInvestors.blog to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in Pollen Street.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Wealth manager Evelyn Partners has been under private-equity ownership. It’s being acquired by NatWest.

There’s been plenty of commentary on what this deal means for the ‘40 or so’ private‑equity players in UK advice. Citywire captured it well in their piece: Evelyn’s £2.7bn sale sets high marker for PE sales, noting:

“Other PE investors will be looking to the headline price they negotiated as a marker of ultimate success. It’s a good sign for them that banks seem willing to throw cash around chasing wealth businesses. Barclays, RBC and Lloyds all sounded out Evelyn at some point so it’s not unreasonable to think they will sound out other deals in the coming years.”

But there’s been less said about the implications for London-listed wealth managers. Evelyn competes with quite a few of these, so comparisons are useful. And once you dig into the Evelyn deal, it’s not a huge leap to conclude there might be a big payday looming for shareholders of the ‘right’ listed company.

About Evelyn, financials, acquisition price

Evelyn has a broad wealth management offering including financial planning, discretionary investment management and a direct-to-consumer platform, BestInvest. It has approximately 270 financial planners and 325 investment managers (source: NatWest acquisition announcement). Here’s how it’s size and business model maps against London-listed wealth management peers. [AUA = assets under administration]

And here’s what we know about some of Evelyn’s key metrics (2025 accounts haven’t been published yet but a few numbers were disclosed with the acquisition announcement):

NatWest is going to be buying the business for £2.7bn enterprise value. Let’s see how that stacks up against others in the listed wealth management space.

Acquisition price looks punchy…

Because we don’t have access to Evelyn’s 2025 profits ‘below’ the EBITDA line, or to its latest balance sheet, the best valuation metric we have is probably the EV/EBITDA multiple, which is around 15. This is higher than the current valuation of all listed peers and the multiple paid for recent acquisitions.

Note the above chart is missing a few comparators, notably St James’s Place (SJP), Quilter, and Rathbones, where Enterprise Value and EBITDA are metrics which don’t make a lot of sense for comparative purposes. This is because of their financial structures. SJP and Quilter house long-term insurance licenses (used to provide clients with certain types of investment bonds and pension-related insurance structures). And Rathbones is a bank (even though its core business is wealth management, it uses its banking license to provide clients with some wealth-management-adjacent deposit and loan services - not transactional banking services).

…especially given fundamental performance

That acquisition multiple might not be a surprise at first glance, but when viewed through the lens of performance versus listed peers, it looks very punchy. While its valuation multiple is higher than peers, Evelyn had the second-weakest AUA growth in 2025…

…the third weakest net flow rate…

…and an OK but not that impressive EBITDA margin. (Furthermore, its statutory PBT is actually very low - see table above - mostly because of the amortisation charges related to previous acquisitions).

For a more comprehensive analysis of wealth managers’ performance in 2025, see my previous post:

NatWest’s rationale

The comments and comparisons above don’t mean that Evelyn won’t be a good acquisition for NatWest, it may very well be.

In its acquisition announcement, NatWest made the following points about deal rationale:

• It diversifies NatWest’s income by increasing fee income (decreasing the proportion of net interest income).

• It broadens NatWest’s wealth management offering (currently £59bn AUA compared to Evelyn’s £69bn) which is currently Coutts (high net worth) and NatWest Premier (mass affluent) - with what looks like a clear intention to cross sell across the group: “NatWest Group also intends to deliver significant revenue synergies through bringing Evelyn Partners’ leading financial planning and investment management solutions together with NatWest Group’s full suite of banking and wealth management solutions to our 20 million customers.”

• It thinks there are significant cost synergies: “NatWest Group expects the combination of Evelyn Partners with its existing PBWM (private bank and wealth management) business to create material shareholder value, including estimated annual run-rate cost synergies of c.£100 million, equivalent to around 10% of the combined PBWM cost base, with costs to achieve of c.£150 million.”

NatWest management were eager to emphasise that the price made sense to them: “Evelyn Partners generated full year 2025 EBITDA of £179m, meaning that the transaction values Evelyn Partners at the equivalent of 9.7x 2025 EV to EBITDA multiple, including target run-rate cost synergies” (my emphasis).

A fun few minutes for those that are interested and have the time would be to listen to the deal announcement analyst call (from around 6 minutes) - where analysts try to get to the bottom of that ‘future’ 9.7x multiple.

Implications for the listed wealth management sector

NatWest have clearly been prepared to pay for a fair chunk of future synergies. With other large banks (possibly other large financial institutions too) sniffing around the wealth management sector, it’s worth thinking about the potential for acquisitions of London-listed companies, and the potential premium to current pricing that might be paid.

It’s not hard to imagine the strategic rationale for further acquisitions, for example:

• With similar logic to NatWest, one of the other major banks could look to beef up its wealth and/or investment management offerings by acquiring say Quilter (£141bn AUA), or Rathbones (£116bn AUA). Quilter also brings a large adviser platform to the table. Rathbones is a bank, so you’d have to think there would be cost savings if acquired by another bank - two banking licenses wouldn’t be needed. The NatWest deal is not a one-off. RBC bought Brewin Dolphin in 2022, when Brewin’s AUA was around £52bn.

• D2C platform businesses have been attractive to a range of buyers over the years - giving direct access to a client base and usually a scalable technology platform. Asset manager Aberdeen bought interactive investor in 2022; bank JP Morgan Chase bought Nutmeg in 2021; and insurer Aviva bought Wealthify in 2017 (the latter two were relatively small deals but the strategic rationale is the point here).

• And then a host of players (including larger wealth/investment managers) might look at ‘buying scale’ in the fast-growing MPS (model portfolio service) space, by acquiring say Tatton, or Brooks Macdonald.

Then consider the multiple that might be paid if the Evelyn deal is anything to go by. Remember the Evelyn deal is being done at an EV/EBITDA multiple of 15x. That’s going to include an ‘acquisition premium’. And that’s for a company with a 2025 AUA growth rate of 8% and an EBITDA margin of 35%. Now compare that to two listed companies, just as examples:

• Tatton currently trades at an EV/EBITDA multiple of around 14.5x (excluding an acquisition premium). But it grew AUA by 22% in just the first three quarters of 2025 (Q4 data not available), and by 30% in its FY to 31 Mar 24. Its EBITDA margin is around 47%.

• AJ Bell currently trades at an EV/EBITDA multiple of just over 11x (excluding an acquisition premium). It grew AUA by 15% in 2025, with an EBITDA margin of 43%.

Putting the above strategic and financial points together, it’s not a stretch to suggest the following:

• if you accept that the NatWest/Evelyn deal multiple is a reasonable benchmark; and

• a large acquirer identifies a strong strategic rationale and/or synergies from an acquisition in the UK-listed wealth management space; then

• that large acquirer will probably have to be paying substantially more than a 15x EV/EBITDA multiple (because most listed players have superior economics than Evelyn).

That is likely to mean the target company’s shareholders might realise a very large premium to current share price (given current EV/EBITDA multiples).

The alternative of course is that NatWest could be paying a price that is simply an outlier (on the expensive side). The passing of time and any future deals will show us which of the above is true. It’s going to be a fascinating sector to watch.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with further insights into the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication and covered Tatton Asset Management as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Tatton here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

In Oct 25, I went into some detail on Jupiter’s valuation in this post:

At that time, my bull case DCF valuation produced a fundamental valuation of 227p per share, my bear case 137p. The current share price (26 Feb 26) is 195p, up c. 3.5% on the day of this results announcement. Here’s the assumptions behind those previous valuations (share prices in the table are at the time of publication of the above post).

And here’s a steer on how the above forward assumptions align with the actual 2025 performance and management’s commentary and outlook from their presentation earlier today (spoiler: they look a bit conservative):

• Net flow rate: Net flow rate over 2025 was +2.9% but it jumped in Q4 (+2.4% in Q4 alone - nearly the highest in the sector - see chart below). Management have said positive flow momentum has continued into Q1-26 with £1bn+ of net flows, that’s around +1.8% of AUM in 2 months alone. My bull case net flow rate assumption is looking light.

  

• Investment performance: Looking forward, there’s obviously huge uncertainty around this assumption. But in 2026, so far so good. The MSCI ACWI is up 4.7% year to date.

• Performance fees: Jupiter knocked it out of the park in 2025 with £120m of performance fees (up from £31m in 2024). As a percentage of net management fees, that’s 27%, 10X my assumption of 2.7% which was based on historical averages. The large performance fee number has also been the main driver of Jupiter announcing a special dividend. (The total 2025 dividend including the special dividend translates to a yield of c. 5%). The jump in performance fees in 2025 will obviously push my bull case valuation upwards. Management have guided around £20m in 2026 which is about double my previous assumption. My bull case performance fee assumptions are looking light over the short term. Of course, there’s no guarantee of these materialising.

• Fee margin: Net fee margin closed 2025 a touch lower than my previous assumption (65bps versus my assumption of 66bps). Management have guided a reduction to 63bps for 2026 which is slightly lower than my previous assumption of 64bps. My net fee margin is looking slightly high, but not materially so.

• Cost: Income ratio: This was 82% in 2025, about in line with my assumption. Management have maintained their target of 70% by 2030, and stated in the results announcement they have increased confidence in meeting this target. Mine is a little more conservative at 75% by that time. If management meet their targets, my cost assumptions are looking a little high.

In summary, Jupiter’s 2025 performance has been far higher than my previous assumptions, driven mainly by a big jump in performance fees. However, management’s outlook and guidance going forward are also mostly higher than my previous bull case assumptions. My bull case valuation is clearly going to go up from the previous 227p per share. I’ll be posting full details of this revised valuation soon…

Subscribe now

Shareholders have enjoyed stellar returns from Jupiter over the last year or so (following a huge fall in the share price over 2022, 2023, and 2024). But there may very well be more juice to come in Jupiter’s jump.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog to get notified when my updated valuation drops and to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in Jupiter Fund Management.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

2025 was a year of solid AUM growth for the UK-listed wealth management sector.

Markets provided a solid tailwind.

But there was huge disparity in net flows. Tatton and PensionBee are clear highflyers. Quilter and Integrafin had solid net flows. Flows were positive but not particularly strong for Aberdeen, St James’s Place, AJ Bell and Schroders. Brooks Macdonald and Rathbones suffered from net outflows.

Quarterly net flow data (shown below as a ‘heat map’) provides far greater insights than the above annual view, highlighting trends of improving or weakening flows.

• Tatton maintains the strongest flows by some distance, even though 2025 saw a slight cooling after a bumper 2024.

• PensionBee flows are still strong, but net flow rate is slowing as AUM grows fairly rapidly off a small base (current AUM c. £7.4bn, next smallest AUM in this group is Brooks Mcdonald at c. £17.8bn excluding advised-only assets).

• Quilter (with the third-largest AUM in this group: c. £141bn) has seen an impressive recovery in net flows since very weak flows in 2023 (0.1% annual net flow rate).

• Q4-25 saw a sharp drop in net flow rates for AJ Bell, St James’s Place, Aberdeen, and (to a lesser extent) Schroders. This was mostly attributed to investor nervousness ahead of the UK budget. For example:

  AJ Bell said: “Record gross inflows were moderated by temporarily elevated outflows, driven largely by uncertainty ahead of the UK Budget. Customers nearing retirement responded to speculation around potential pension tax changes, resulting in a £500 million increase in pension withdrawals compared with Q1 FY25.”

  St James’s Place said: “The final quarter also saw elevated short-term outflows, as many clients accelerated tax-free cash (TFC) withdrawals from their pensions in anticipation of reduced TFC allowances. As we exited the quarter, we were pleased to see both outflow rates and client engagement normalise, and this has continued into the early part of 2026.”

• Brooks Mcdonald appears to be making good progress in turning around the very weak flows of 2023 and 2024. Net flows were positive in Q4-25 after a protracted period of net outflows. This is especially impressive given the jump in gross outflows seen by others during this quarter.

• Rathbones is still struggling with net outflows, but investor sentiment certainly seems to be turning (see below), following the integration of the large Investec Wealth acquisition and the appointment of a new CEO.

Share price moves differed hugely across the sector, with some relatively steady, and others extremely volatile.

• St James’s Place recovered strongly after it’s huge c. 77% slump over 2022, 2023, and early-2024. But it was then hit again by the “AI will replace advisers” scare of early-Feb 26. The share price is c. 27% off early-2022 highs.

• Rathbone’s share price had a strong year, with markets responding very positively to the appointment and early-tenure messaging of new CEO Jonathan Sorrell (announced Mar 25).

• Quilter also had a strong year as business fundamentals, especially net flows, improved.

• Other share price moves were relatively small.

This has left forward-PE Ratios in a fairly tight range.

I’m not surprised by Tatton’s highest-in-sector PER, given its far superior growth and especially strong net flows. But the premium doesn’t appear particularly large. See my previous research on Tatton here.

And I’m not surprised by Rathbones and Brooks Macdonald having the lowest PERs, given their weaker net flows. But again, these are not huge discounts.

PensionBee is an outlier as it is still far earlier-stage than others in this group, and is not yet profitable on a statutory earnings basis (but it’s not far off). See my previous comments on PensionBee here.

What is clear, is that untangling investment opportunities in the wealth management space requires some deeper digging than a cursory overview of some of the “headline numbers” presented above. I’ll be doing some of that digging in future posts.

My next post covering this sector is to dig a little deeper into the relative valuation of Evelyn Partners which is to be acquired by Natwest. Only some of the latest financials of Evelyn have been disclosed, but there are a few clues we can take a look at to put that deal in context and compare it to current valuations of listed companies in the UK wealth management sector.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to be notified when these upcoming posts are published and to keep up to date with further insights into the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication and covered Tatton Asset Management as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Tatton here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

When you dig into valuations in the UK asset management sector, a segmentation becomes clear:

1. There’s a group ‘priced to win’, which seem to be performing well on fundamentals, and have share prices reflecting solid (but I wouldn’t say spectacular) growth expectations. Investors need to assess if these can keep performing.

2. There’s a group ‘priced to lose’, with some clear weaknesses in their fundamentals (at the moment). Investors need to assess if they can turn things around. There could be huge rewards for those calling a turnaround correctly.

3. Then there’s a ‘peloton’, with a mixed back of fundamentals, opportunities and risks, which are valued quite similarly. Investors need to evaluate who might make a break for the lead, or drop off the back.

In part 1, published a few days ago, I looked at assets under management (AUM) movements over 2025. It’s important context for this post and I’d recommend reading it before this one.

Who’s trading at a premium, who’s at a discount?

PE ratios can be misleading in the asset management sector. If calculated using statutory earnings, they can get heavily distorted in some cases. The three main culprits are:

1. Amortisation arising from acquisition accounting: Quite a few AMs have made acquisitions over the last few years and as part of this, usually book an intangible asset on their balance sheet (e.g. ‘acquired customer relationships’) and then amortise that asset over time. This non-cash cost can be significant. For example, in Premier Miton’s latest results, this amortisation charge was £5.2m, compared to PBT of £2.4m, so it has a huge inflating impact on the ‘statutory’ PE ratio, pushing it to more than 60 in this case, which I think is fair to say is a misleading ratio.

2. Movements in the value of on-balance-sheet investments: AMs often have investments on their balance sheet (e.g. they might invest their own capital to seed a new fund) which are sometimes very significant in relation to the size of their balance sheet (more detail below). These usually get marked-to-market with the change in value running through the income statement. This gain or loss can sometimes be significant and again distort earnings and PE ratios. For example, in its latest half-year results, ICG’s income statement recorded net gains on investments of £137m compared to PBT of £354m, which deflates its statutory PE ratio.

3. Exceptional/non-recurring charges: Usually related to acquisitions, or to ‘one-off’ transformation/restructuring programmes.

So, it’s useful to look at PERs with the above items stripped out of earnings. In the chart below I show these ‘adjusted’ PERs (black bars) as well as PERs based on statutory earnings (grey dotted bars) to illustrate how PERs for the same company can be wildly different depending on how you measure earnings.

But even the above adjusted PE ratios are not quite telling the whole story. Baked into share prices are, in some cases, very substantial net cash positions and very substantial on-balance sheet investments. Well, they should be baked into the share price - I’m not convinced they actually are in all cases.”

In the chart below, I show the latest available net cash and net on-balance-sheet investment value (combined) as a percentage of share price.

The difference between that balance sheet value and the share price are the green bars above (red in the case of Mercia – an extreme outlier – see further commentary below), which I’ve labelled as an approximate market value of fund management business. That’s anything but perfect because of course asset managers need some cash for regulatory compliance and to run their business and sometimes need to invest in their own funds to build clients’ confidence - you can’t totally isolate these balance sheet items. But it is useful to highlight the scale of some asset managers’ cash piles and investment portfolios.

So for an even better relative comparison of asset managers’ valuations, we can strip out the value of the above balance sheet items from the share price, and create a ‘balance-sheet-adjusted PER’, which deducts the net cash and net investments per share from each company’s share price, and then divides that by adjusted earnings per share.

On a standalone basis, the absolute values of these PERs are not that useful (as part of these balance sheet items are necessary to generate earnings), but the relative value of these PERs between asset managers is extremely useful. It strips out a lot of the noise found in ‘normal’ PE Ratios and really does tease out which asset managers’ share prices are baking in earnings growth, or not.

Priced to win

Three asset managers are clearly priced for higher earnings growth than others: Man Group, Pollen Street, and Ashmore. There’s a case to be made that this makes sense, but investors need to really dig into the details:

Man Group

It has recorded the strongest net flows by some margin in recent times (see part 1 of this post) and has clearly got an attractive offering to many clients. It’s ‘quant focus’ is a key differentiator. The share price has staged a significant recovery after heavy falls in 2024 and early-2025. It looks well placed fundamentally but a fair amount of earnings growth is already priced in. Investors also need to have a stomach for volatile earnings as a result of the significance of its performance fees. Keep a look out for 2025 results - to be released on 26 Feb 26.

Pollen Street

This private equity and private credit specialist is also showing strong growth at AUM and earnings level. Its funds are attracting significant interest from investors all around the world with a Q3 trading update (to 30 Sep 25) showing AUM up 32% y-o-y. EBITDA was up 28% y-o-y in the half-year to 30 Jun 25. The share price seems to have been in a reasonably solid uptrend over the last two years or so. Keep a look out for 2025 results - usually out in late-March.

Ashmore

This emerging markets fixed income specialist has had a torrid few years - in fundamental terms (huge outflows) and in share price terms (huge price falls). Much of that was clearly down to emerging markets being out of favour relative to the US. But that seems to have turned around (although it’s very early days). Net outflows slowed during 2025 and turned sharply positive in Q4. The share price has more than doubled since Apr 25 lows. Adjusted EBITDA is a fraction of what it used to be: £53m in the FY to 30 Jun 25, compared to £196m in the FY to 30 Jun 21. So there’s potential for a big earnings recovery, but that’s highly dependent on the net flow recovery continuing. Interim results are due on 12 Feb 26.

Priced to lose

Mercia

Mercia is a true outlier. You would no doubt have picked that up from the chart above showing a negative balance-sheet-adjusted-PE-Ratio. The share price discounts the value of its significant on-balance sheet investments by an enormous amount. This is so large I titled one of my more recent posts, summarising its interim results, as follows:

It looks to me that in this case, a high-quality asset management business is just fundamentally mispriced. But do your own research on this one. To help you, you may want to watch my recent interview with CEO Mark Payton here: In conversation with Dr Mark Payton (CEO).

Premier Miton, Liontrust, Impax

These have not (yet?) turned the corner that Ashmore (and others) have. They are still experiencing substantial outflows, and their share prices keep getting hammered. But I don’t think the future direction of their share prices is particularly complicated. They simply have to get back to positive net flows. If that happens, share prices are likely to jump. Just look at the share price reaction of Ashmore, Jupiter, and Ninety One when their flows turned around after prolonged periods of outflows. It was huge. Up 106%, 195%, and 113% from their Apr 25 lows respectively. If net flows don’t turn positive, these share prices are likely to keep lagging peers.

Can they do this?

Premier Miton

In its latest AUM update, Premier Miton recorded net outflows in all strategies except fixed income, which were positive. Equities experienced quite heavy outflows. It said: “

“…outflows from our US and European equity strategies continued into the current Period, reflecting investor risk aversion and the rotation away from growth‑oriented equities seen over recent quarters… Demand for our fixed income strategies remained robust… Although market conditions have been challenging, particularly for active equity managers, we are encouraged by the improvement in short‑term performance across several key strategies, particularly in the US. With interest rates now falling, we believe the environment for active equity investing should become more constructive as we move through 2026…”

Outflows can’t only be blamed on market conditions though. While most active equity managers have indeed experienced net outflows, not all have. Man Group, Schroders, and Jupiter (all with large equities franchises) have recorded positive net flows in most of 2025, and Polar was only very slightly negative. So I suppose it’s just about Premier Miton delivering on its cautiously optimistic outlook.

Liontrust

I find Liontrust a tricky one to evaluate. It has a very large UK-retail client base (through wholesale and other channels: around 86% of AUM is in UK retail funds, MPS, and Investment Trusts). But the recent narrative has covered more bases. There has been much talk about diversification. From a client-type diversification perspective, Liontrust has said it wants to grow its institutional client base. In a recent CityWire interview of CEO John Ions (worth a read), a big emphasis was on acquisitions and on the diversification benefits that could bring (products, geographies and distribution). He also emphasised up-skilling the sales team. So how all of that pieces together remains to be seen.

Impax

In the case of Impax, I’ve looked into this in some detail, and would refer you to my latest Equity Development research note. It’s been hard hit by outflows (an especially large St James’s Place mandate was lost). But Impax is highly focused and I reckon could turn the corner sooner rather than later. I wrote in the above note:

“Our expectation is that Impax will return to robust long-term growth. It operates in the sustainable investing space which, despite many headlines to the contrary, is a huge US$3.7trn market that is growing… Impax is uniquely placed… It has been focused on finding economically attractive investments within the sustainable transition for 27 years. It has not opportunistically ridden the ‘ESG bandwagon’. As others exit this space and the number of competing funds fall, Impax can thrive”.

But it’s not thriving yet.

In part three of this post, I’ll be looking into ‘The Peloton’, and evaluate who might make a break for the lead, or drop off the back.

Subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication, and covered Impax Asset Management, Polar Capital, and Mercia Asset Management, as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on these companies by clicking on each. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Note of edits: This post originally referred to an upcoming ‘part 2’. That has been updated to refer to ‘parts 2 & 3’. Part 2 started becoming very long, so was split to become parts 2 & 3.

During 2025, and into January 2026, shareholders of UK-listed Asset Managers experienced wildly divergent fortunes.

In this part 1, I look at assets under management (AUM) movements over 2025, and the impact it has had on asset managers’ share prices. Spoiler: Often, the impact is huge, and changing AUM fortunes, especially net flows, can have a VERY rapid, and VERY large impact on share prices (more detail below).

But it’s not all about AUM. In parts 2 & 3 of this series, to be published in a few days, I’ll look into other factors: cost cutting, management & strategy changes, acquisitions, asset classes moving in or out of favour, share buy-backs, and more. I’ll also present the current ‘state of play’ of valuations in the sector (it’s not just about PE ratios!).

These two posts should hopefully make it a bit clearer if 2025 has left some asset managers richly valued, and others trading at unjustified bargain basement levels.

Be sure to subscribe to receive parts 2 & 3 as soon as they are published.

Subscribe now

A year of AUM growth (mostly)

2025 was a year which saw most UK-listed asset managers grow AUM, but the variance between managers was enormous.

Investment returns the primary growth driver

Growth was primarily due to strong markets and solid investment returns, despite the sharp falls in Apr 25 related to the US’s ‘liberation day’ tariff announcements.

Standout returns were achieved by City of London Investment Group (CLIG), driven in particular by its emerging markets and international equities strategies, and by Polar Capital, driven in particular by its large exposure to technology equities strategies (this was despite a currency headwind as Polar reports AUM in GBP which strengthened significantly against the dollar in 2025 - see note in chart above).

Volatile flows, mostly negative but improving

Net flows were volatile during 2025 with heavy outflows relatively common. With the exception of Man Group which attracted strong net inflows during Q1-Q3 and Ashmore in Q4, even when positive net flows were recorded by asset managers, these were not large.

But it was mostly an improving picture during the year, especially compared to a very weak Q1 (I would expect to see two more green bars added to Q4 in the chart below: Ninety One reported +5% AUM growth in Q4 - it did not split out the impact of flows and investment returns - but investment returns are unlikely to have been that high in the quarter so it probably achieved positive net flows; and given Man Group’s recent strong flow momentum, it’s reasonable to expect positive flows for Q4 - it hadn’t reported at the time of publication).

Share prices (often) follow flow fortunes

Now let’s revert back to share price movements and dive into some more detail on the link between share price and AUM flow. While share price divergence is linked to many factors, net flow fortunes are clearly playing a big role.

Just look at the differing share price fortunes (over a three-year period) of Jupiter, Ninety One and Ashmore; versus Impax, Liontrust and Premier Miton.

In 2023 and for most of 2024, all six of these asset managers experienced consistent and heavy net outflows.

But the net flow fortunes of Jupiter, Ninety One, and Ashmore started to turnaround in 2025 and move into positive net flows:

• Jupiter: Net flows turned positive in Q2-25 after negative net flows in 8 out of 9 quarters between Jan 23 and Mar 25.

• Ninety One: Net flows jumped substantially in the Apr-Sep 25 half-year after 5 consecutive half-years of heavy outflows and a small positive net flow in Oct 24 – Mar 25 half-year.

• Ashmore: Outflows slowed substantially in Q2 & Q3 25, then turned positive in Q4-25 after 11 quarters of negative net flows (from Jan 23)

As can be seen from the chart above, the share prices of Jupiter, Ninety One and Ashmore kicked upwards very rapidly with this net flow turnaround.

Premier Miton, Liontrust, and Impax have not (yet?) turned this corner. These managers are still experiencing substantial outflows and their share prices keep getting hammered. But the share price reaction of other managers suggests that if and when net flows turnaround, the share price reaction could be substantial over a very short period. In part 2 of this post, I’ll look into the potential for that occurring.

What I’ll also be doing in parts two & three is laying out the current valuations of all fifteen UK-listed asset managers, and on a company-by-company basis, looking into what I think might be the most important triggers (beyond AUM moves) for future share price moves.

Subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication, and covered Impax Asset Management, Polar Capital, and Mercia Asset Management, as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on these companies by clicking on each. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

I recently sat down with Dr Mark Payton, CEO of Mercia Asset Management. You can watch the full interview here (33mins).

Or you can dip into shorter sections of the interview below:

About Mercia: Business model, differentiators, sourcing investment opportunities others don’t see, why investing outside of London has huge potential for attractive investment returns. (3mins)

Investment opportunities in Venture Capital, Private Equity, Debt, Property, Real Assets; where Mercia sources capital; growth headroom (7mins)

Implications of the UK Budget: Autumn ‘25 budget, British Business Bank, EIS, VCTs. (5mins)

Driving shareholder returns: realising direct investments; growing the fund management business; simplifying the business. (2mins)

On-balance sheet investments: the NAV/share-price disconnect – how Mercia values direct investments; pragmatic exit strategies; working with management; current exit environment. (8mins)

History of acquisition success & potential for a 'real assets' acquisition. (3mins)

Useful metrics for shareholders to track Mercia's success: scaling to drive operational leverage, productivity & efficiency; using AI to assist scaling. (3mins)

You can read my latest research note about Mercia Asset Management here: EBITDA & margin up again, undervaluation rises.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in Mercia Asset Management and covered it as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Mercia here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Since its strong rally in the first half of 2024, PensionBee’s share price looks stuck.

This is two businesses:

• The original UK business, which is now well established but still scaling-up. It looks to have comfortably moved past breakeven, while maintaining solid reinvestment to maintain growth of its customer base and AUA.

• Then there is the US business which has only just launched. Being so early stage, there are really only ‘project milestones’ to judge progress. More ‘hard metrics’ around customer numbers and AUA growth are expected during 2026. The potential in the US is enormous.

It’s impossible to untangle how much of the share price is being attributed to each business. But let’s dig into the latest update to see what might move the share price needle.

PensionBee UK

Growth is still strong.

Net flows have been relatively consistent at around £200m per quarter, with some seasonality.

The seasonality of the business is more obvious in marketing spend deployment, with Q1 typically conducive to ramping up spending, and Q4 less so. The run up to Christmas is not that conducive for encouraging consumers to invest in their pensions.

Also worth noting is that in the second half of 2025, the UK budget was certainly a drag on pension investments - an issue highlighted by PensionBee and others in the UK wealth management space.

This can be seen in marketing spend efficiency. In 2025, PensionBee generated lower gross inflows per £ of marketing spend compared to prior years. In the chart below it is clear that the usual Q4 spike in gross inflows per £ of marketing spend was largely absent in 2025 (this metric usually spikes in Q4 as marketing spend in Q4 falls while gross inflows should still have some momentum from marketing spend in Q2 & Q3).

The company also attributes the fall in marketing spend efficiency to its strategy of targeting a slightly younger age cohort in 2025. The size of incoming pension pots are highly correlated to age (older cohorts bring larger pension pots).

In PensionBee’s results presentation on 21 Jan 26, CFO Christoph Martin said they are targeting a slightly older demographic in 2026, with a subsequent increase in incoming pot size expected, which should also drive an increase in gross inflows per £ of marketing spend. With the UK budget out of the way, a less nervous consumer should also contribute to increased gross inflows.

This is a metric I’ll be watching out for in the first two quarters of 2026 to see if there is any ‘bounce back’ in marketing spend efficiency.

Offsetting the above headwind though has been a continuing increase in operating leverage. One of the cleaner measures of this is the number of invested customers per staff member - and this remains on a solid upwards trajectory as PensionBee scales.

AUA growth and operating leverage has translated to improving financials for PensionBee’s UK business.

It’s worth highlighting that:

1. Revenue is recurring and is compounded as positive net flows (from new customers transferring their pension pots to PensionBee and from existing customers topping up their pension pots) add to an existing AUA base from which fees are generated.

2. The average age of a PensionBee customer is around 40, and the customer retention rate is c. 96%, so flows from existing customers should grow rapidly over time. This is not just about winning new customers.

3. EBITDA is volatile on a quarterly basis, mostly because of the volatility in marketing spend.

4. EBITDA has clearly moved into positive territory for the UK, with the business now able to reinvest profits. PensionBee UK doubled its EBITDA in 2025, despite a substantial ramp up in marketing spend from £9m to £12m.

While there are certainly some market headwinds in the form of UK customers being more reluctant to invest in their pensions because of economic and policy uncertainty, it’s pretty clear to me that PensionBee UK is a business with an engine that is purring along smoothly. I expect growth to continue and profits to ramp quite quickly over the next few years.

PensionBee US

It’s very early days for the US business. It has only just launched and AUA is just US$3m. 2025 was really about building the foundations and building brand awareness. But the ball is rolling and the opportunity is enormous. It’s just hard to judge how big this business could be.

As I’ve said before, PensionBee’s US strategy this looks well-thought-through. It is not a moon-shot move by a UK business wanting to tackle the largest market in the world. PensionBee is partnering with the large US financial State Street, which it has a longstanding relationship with. State Street has run investments for PensionBee since around 2016 and became a shareholder in 2017. I’d refer you to pages 13-16 of its 2024 results presentation for a good summary of what PensionBee is doing in the US and pages 9-12 of its 2025 interim results presentation for an update..

Another point worth highlighting is that PensionBee is unashamedly ‘leaning west’, trying to attract more interest from US shareholders. This makes sense. I think it’s fair to say US investors are far more enthusiastic about a growth story than UK investors. PensionBee has had significant US shareholders for quite a few years now. But as its presence as a business builds there, so too should its profile as a business to invest in. (There was a reason that in 2024 it moved its results announcements from the usual UK early-morning slot to late-afternoon UK-time!).

To further grease the wheels of this ‘westward lean’, PensionBee announced in Dec 25 it has qualified to trade on the OTCQX Best Market (’OTCQX’) - .

PensionBee will continue to trade primarily on the London Stock Exchange (LON: PBEE). The OTCQX trading facility will operate alongside this primary listing to enhance international investor access and support improved, cost-effective trading convenience.

‘Unsticking’ the share price

The first chart of this post shows that PensionBee’s share price appears stuck in a range. What might move the share price (to the upside)?

1. Success in the UK should move it upwards, but probably gradually. Success would mean continuing to build customer numbers, AUA, and a rapid ramp up in cash generation and profitability. As investors start to see profits move from promise to reality and become larger and larger, they will likely assign a larger value to the UK business (it also becomes far easier to value when it’s profitable!). But I reckon this is likely to be a gradual process, building value over a few years.

2. Strong traction in the US could provide a sudden kick upwards. The US might be a different story. If PensionBee starts to show tangible and rapid progress in the US (initially measured by customer numbers, AUA, and revenue), investors might assign a much higher value to this business as PensionBee US moves from ‘buildout’ to ‘initial growth’ to ‘scale-up’. But what do those numbers need to be and by when, to trigger a share price move?

What do you think? Feel free to post thoughts in the comments section of this post.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in PensionBee.

This is an update of a previous post which I keep pinned to the top of the website. It is an overview of the UK-listed asset and wealth management sector. There’s been quite a few changes since the original post!

TheInvestors.blog aims to provide nuggets of market and company analysis for shareholders of publicly-listed asset and wealth managers.

It should also be a useful read for directors, executives, and managers of these companies - offering insights into how investors are thinking about them and their peers.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Which companies are written about?

There are two main groups of companies covered in this newsletter:

1. Asset managers (left hand column in graphic below): These run investment funds which would typically make up only a part of an investor’s portfolio. Funds often have some sort of specialisation such as investing in a particular industry sector, asset class, or geography. Funds can certainly grow rapidly and benefit from ‘hot asset classes’ (think private assets over the last few years). But fund assets tend to be less sticky than those managed by wealth managers. Think about a scenario when an investor wants to exit an investment placed with an asset manager. They would be likely to move those assets to another asset manager or into cash.

2. Wealth managers (right hand column in graphic below): These tend to house all or a large part of an investors’ portfolio (often spread across a range of investments such as individual equities or asset managers’ investment funds). The invested assets may or may not be coupled with investment advice. Assets tend to be stickier than those of asset managers. Think about a scenario when an investor wants to exit an investment or asset class, they will probably execute this switch without moving assets from their wealth manager. It is simply a case of switching from one financial product to another. This newsletter also includes platforms (such as AJ Bell and IntegraFin - Hargreaves Lansdown is no longer publicly-listed) and discretionary fund managers or DFMs (such as Tatton Asset Management, Brooks Macdonald) in the wealth management segment, as they tend to manage or administer portfolios for investors.

There are also companies which run both asset and wealth management operations (centre column in graphic below).

Who does what?

The big beasts (with asset and wealth management operations)

Schroders: Multinational asset manager with diverse offering serving a range of institutional and private investors. Public and private markets investment capabilities. It also has a significant advisory business (e.g. investment and advisory services to corporate pension schemes, insurance companies etc). Asset management AUM dominates (> 80% of AUM). It has a smaller but still significant wealth management arm (Cazenove Capital, Benchmark, Schroders Personal Wealth).

Aberdeen: Three segments: Investments - multinational asset management business with a range of funds, investment solutions and investment trusts (>70% of AUM); Adviser - UK’s 2nd largest adviser platform; Interactive Investor - the UK’s 2nd largest D2C investment platform.

Asset management segment

Man Group: Invests in equities, credit and multi-assets across public and private markets. Quant-focused (systematic) strategies as well as fundamental, research driven strategies. Roughly 40-45% of AUM sourced from EMEA, 40% Americas, 15-20% Asia Pacific.

Ninety One: Teams covering equities, fixed income, and multi-asset. Origins in South Africa, where it still has substantial operations and is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (in addition to its London-listing). Now a global operation with around 40% of AUM sourced from clients in Africa, 33% UK & Europe, 17% APAC and 10-12% Americas. ·

ICG [Intermediate Capital Group]: Private markets specialist with private equity (mid and upper-mid market), credit (direct lending, mezzanine, and structured credit solutions), real assets (infrastructure equity, real estate, and related private market strategies), and secondaries strategies (through ICG Strategic Equity, acquiring stakes in private equity funds). Operates across EMEA, America, APAC, UK & Ireland.

Jupiter: Active manager with equities, fixed income and multi-manager strategies. Primarily UK (c. 65% of AUM) and EMEA (c. 22%) client base. 82% of AUM from retail, wholesale and investment trust channels, 18% from institutional investors. A key strategy is to increase proportion of institutional AUM.

Ashmore: Specialist emerging markets active manager focused primarily on fixed income strategies (c. 85% of AUM) with equities making up c. 12% of AUM.

Impax: Specialist is sustainable investing. Mostly listed equities strategies but also offers fixed income, systematic, and private markets strategies. A key focus is to build fixed income AUM. Clients mainly institutional investors. 58% of AUM sourced from EMEA, 7% UK, 34% North America, 1% APAC.

Liontrust: Active manager with equities and especially UK-equities bias. UK retail investors dominate client base (83% of AUM in UK retail funds and MPS). Largest investment strategies are Sustainable Investment (35% of AUM) and Multi-Asset (18%).

Polar Capital: ‘Multi-boutique’ with 14 investment teams managing specialist portfolios with a thematic, sector, geographic, or financial instrument focus. Technology (51% of AUM), healthcare (14%) and Emerging Markets & Asia (14%) are the largest strategies. Targets mostly institutional investors with client base primarily in UK (c. 61%) and across Europe ex-UK (c. 26%).

Foresight: Specialist investor in infrastructure/real assets (80% of AUM), private equity (12% of AUM) and listed securities (8% of AUM), mostly with a sustainability theme e.g. energy transition.

Premier Miton: Manages a range of equity strategies (45% of AUM: 16% of total AUM in UK equities, 29% in non-UK), multi-asset (26%), fixed income (21%), and absolute return (8%) strategies. Most of its AUM is in funds but it does have some AUM sourced via segregated mandates (11%) and investment trusts (3%).

CLIG: City of London Investment Group invests primarily in closed-end funds (equity, fixed income and alternatives). It’s London-based business has an institutional investor focus and a significant emerging markets investment focus (34% of AUM). It also has a US business (37% of AUM) which primarily has a HNW individual client base.

Pollen Street: Private markets specialist (equity: 62% of AUM; credit: 38% of AUM). AUM mainly sourced from investors in Europe ex-UK (34%), USA (31%), UK (19%), and Middle East and Asia (16%). It’s £6.1bn of AUM includes c. £0.5bn of on-balance-sheet investments. Sector focus in payments, wealth, insurance, tech-enabled services, and lending.

River Global: Focussed on acquiring asset and wealth management businesses. Asset management businesses held in separate A-shares. Stake in wealth management platform Parmenion is held in B-shares.

Mercia: Venture capital, development finance (mostly SME loans) and property finance to mostly regional (ex-London) UK businesses, investing between £100k and £20m. It manages c£1.8bn of funds for third parties and invests alongside them with c. £130m of on balance sheet investments. It intends to increase focus on third party fund management and divest from most of its on-balance-sheet investments.

Wealth management segment:

St James’s Place: Advice-led wealth manager with ‘partner’ adviser model (tied to SJP). It has around 4,900 advisers. AUM primarily in mass-affluent space (78% of AUM in £100k-£2m assets-per-client range). Ambitions to push further into HNW segment (£2m-£10m) which currently makes up around 15% of AUM and ultra-HNW (>£10m), which makes up around 7% of AUM.

Quilter: Advice-led wealth manager in 1) Affluent segment with £50k-£250k to invest (c. 73% of AUM: sourced via restricted/tied advisers and third-party IFAs using Quilter platform) and 2) HNW segment with >£250k to invest (c. 26% of AUM: sourced via restricted/tied advisers and IFAs). Also runs investment solutions (discretionary fund management and portfolio services).

AJ Bell: Adviser platform and D2C platform (61% and 32% of AUA respectively). Adviser platform is 4th largest in UK after Quilter, Aberdeen, and Transact. D2C platform also 4th largest after HL, Interactive Investor and Fidelity. Also has non-platform AJ Bell Investments business making up 6% of AUA.

IntegraFin: Holding company of adviser platform Transact (technology and investment platform), which is the 3rd largest adviser platform in the UK (after Quilter and Aberdeen).

Tatton: Serves smaller, UK-based Independent Financial Advisers via two business units: Tatton Investment Management - discretionary fund management (c87% of group revenue), and Paradigm - regulatory and compliance consulting and outsourcing, plus mortgage and protection insurance aggregation (c13% of group revenue).

Brooks Macdonald: Provides investment management services for financial advisers and private clients in the UK and financial advice services directly to private clients.

PensionBee: High-growth, earlier-stage business, IPO’d in 2021. D2C model giving customers the ability to switch and consolidate ‘legacy’ pension pots (typically from previous jobs). Focus on UK market to date but recently launched in US also.

What to expect from this newsletter

Future posts will include commentary on the most important issues for shareholders:

• individual company financial results;

• quarterly, half-yearly, and annual comparisons of assets-under-management movements to tease out who’s winning and who’s losing;

• macro-trends of where capital is moving from and to, and which asset managers benefit or lose from these trends;

• strategic sector analysis; and

• thoughts on opportunities and threats.

Lastly, I’m always open to suggestions and feedback - what you liked, what you didn’t like, what you’d like to see in future posts.

Subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication, and covered Impax Asset Management, Polar Capital, Mercia Asset Management, and Tatton Asset Management, as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on these companies by clicking on each. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Mercia released interim results for its FY26 on 2 Dec 25. My Equity Development research note covering the results is out. You can read the full note here.

Some highlights:

• H1-26 (to 30 Sep 25) saw EBITDA jump 14% y-o-y to £4.2m and EBITDA margin up from 20.8% to 24.6%.

• AUM was marginally up at £2.0bn. Capital raises and new mandates added +£52m, offset by distributions of -£56m: mostly dividends to VCT shareholders and returns of capital by funds in their realisation phase. Valuation moves added +£16m. There were no redemptions. Post period-end, £38m was raised by Northern VCTs and the North East Accelerate Fund launched with £35m of FUM.

• The capital raising pipeline is very strong at £880m. Source-of-funds diversification is on track with £550m of the pipeline from institutional investors, £200m from the public sector, and £130m from retail investors. Mercia looks on track to meet our short- and medium-term forecasts, which are unchanged, and we expect AUM to ratchet up towards Mercia’s target of £3.0bn over the next few years.

• Mercia’s net cash of £34m equates to 9p per share (27% of market cap).

• We value its fee-earning fund management business at 18p per share (10x EBITDA).

• The NAV of its direct investments’ portfolio is £131m or 31p per share (>100% of market cap).

That’s a sum-of-the-parts value of 58p per share, almost double the share price. Clearly, the portfolio is being deeply discounted by investors, yet Mercia has a proven track record of exiting at a premium to NAV. Its strategy is to sell c. 70% of the portfolio over the next few years, so it won’t take long to see if the market is being grossly over-conservative.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in Mercia Asset Management and covered it as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Mercia here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

My Equity Development research note covering Tatton Asset Management’s H1-26 is out.

• You can read the full note here.

• You can see the management presentation and Q&A with investors here.

And here is the summary of my note:

After its Oct 25 trading update, we knew Tatton had maintained its exceptional growth momentum; Assets-Under-Management/ Influence (AUI) were up 18% over H1-26, and net flows remained strong at £281m/ month, above Tatton’s guidance for FY26 of £200-£250m/ month. In the post-results period, AUI growth has continued, up another 5% to £27.1bn on 14 Nov 25. YTD net flows have increased from £1.68bn over H1 to £2.07bn.

With more recent peer data becoming available, we now also know H1 growth and flows were far higher than all peers. And we know H1 growth has translated to an exceptionally strong set of financial results with revenue, profits and net cash all sharply up. Compared to peers, and especially given the macro environment, it is a truly impressive performance.

The balance sheet remains strong with no debt and net cash up 6% over H1 to £34.1m (after paying the final FY25 dividend of £5.7m). An interim dividend of 12.0p is proposed (+26%; H1-25: 9.5p).

We highlight that even after fully acknowledging current macro-economic headwinds and UK budget uncertainty, management’s outlook is strong. Near-term, Tatton has “confidence in delivering results in line with market expectations”. Longer-term, Tatton has “confidence in achieving the £30 billion AUM/I target by FY29”. We note Tatton is ahead of trajectory to deliver on that goal.

Given current momentum, our FY26 forecasts probably look conservative. However, markets are volatile, and we err on the side of caution, maintaining our forecasts and fundamental value of 750p per share.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant covered Tatton Asset Management as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Tatton here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

My Equity Development research note covering Polar Capital’s H1-26 is out. Read the full note here.

Key to understanding Polar’s prospects…

1. In the short term, is this chart. It shows Polar going into H2-26 at a far higher AUM level than last year. Absent a sharp fall in AUM during H2, it is likely to see a jump in average AUM over H2 which is its primary driver of revenue. That should also drive strong results in FY26 (ending 31 Mar 26) over FY25.

2. Over the longer-term, is this chart, which shows how its investment teams mostly outperform benchmark indexes, especially over the long term. That in turn should attract client capital. I was especially impressed by the technology team’s outperformance in the short term. Strong returns from the 'mag-7’ have had a huge influence on tech index returns. But Polar has comfortably outperformed benchmark indexes. That means its technology teams are uncovering highly attractive tech investment opportunities outside the mag-7. That’s why active managers exist.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a Polar Capital and covered Polar Capital as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Polar here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

In part 1 of this post, I set the scene for a comparison between UK-listed asset managers Jupiter and Liontrust.

In this part 2, I’ll do a deep dive into Jupiter. Part 3 (coming soon) will be a deep dive into Liontrust. Be sure to subscribe to get notified of when that piece is published.

Subscribe now

Jupiter suffered a heavy and prologued share price fall starting around mid-2021 though to April 2025. Then it staged a strong recovery (although the share price is still nowhere near 2021 highs).

So where to from here? Has the recovery run its course? Or is there more juice to squeeze out of Jupiter’s jump?

I can’t predict the future share price. But in this deep dive I hope to shed some light on a few of the drivers behind Jupiter’s fundamental valuation, and to see what bull-case and bear-case fundamental valuations might look like, and how those differ from the current share price. Note that share prices can deviate from fundamental valuations for quite some time! But hopefully this is a useful insight for those investors doing their own research into Jupiter.

Before jumping in, a disclosure. This is not just a theoretical exercise for me. I am a Jupiter shareholder, sitting on a pretty (paper) profit of >90% (dividends reinvested). My average entry price was around 86p. The share price at the time of publication was around 154p.

My original investment thesis was a recovery play. Jupiter didn’t have to get back to being a high-flyer. It just needed to get back to being a business that wasn’t in decline. That would be enough for a substantial re-rating. So far so good. Now what… Stick or Twist?

Troubles and turnarounds

A quick look back before we look forward.

Current CEO Mathew Beesley was appointed in late-2022. He took on a tough job.

Save for benefitting from the Covid recovery boom in 2019, shareholders had suffered. This chart is from the 2022 annual report.

Clients were pulling their funds.

The only boosts to AUM came from (mostly) strong markets between 2018 and 2021, and the acquisition of Merian Global Investors in 2020, which accounted for all of the AUM boost in that year (£16.6bn of AUM was acquired).

Despite the increase in scale between 2018 and 2021, cost efficiencies were not achieved at group level. And when AUM fell sharply with markets and nervous investors in 2022, the cost to income ratio spiked.

Early in Beesley’s tenure, AUM continued to suffer from repeated hits of heavy and sometimes lumpy outflows (from the retail channel, the loss of an investment management deal with Chrysalis, and star fund managers leaving). This contributed to a further rise in the cost:income ratio. The chart below is from the 2024 annual report.

So, a huge part of Beesley’s first few years was to ‘stop the bleeding’ of AUM, get it growing again, and to trim the cost base. He identified four strategic objectives:

1. INCREASE SCALE... in select geographies and channels

2. DECREASE UNDUE COMPLEXITY... with costs managed carefully through a relentless pursuit of efficiency

3. BROADEN OUR APPEAL TO CLIENTS... with a curated product offering, while exploring new methods of delivery

4. DEEPEN RELATIONSHIPS WITH ALL STAKEHOLDERS... with purpose and sustainability embedded in all we do

On the scale/AUM front, It looks like he might now be starting to win. AUM and flows have ticked up into positive territory in the last few quarters. For active managers, positive net flows have been the exception rather than the rule in 2025 - so Jupiter’s recent flows are relatively impressive.

There are also positives on the cost front.

Jupiter’s 2024 results stated:

Over the last few years, we have had a particular focus on cost discipline. We announced £20 million of annualised savings in 2022. We delivered lower costs again in 2023, and whilst costs are slightly up this year (2024), we have managed below the guidance we provided at the beginning of the year.

And a May 25 announcement stated:

We have identified further opportunities to deliver cost efficiencies. The initial target is £15m annualised savings, which will be fully implemented on a run rate basis no later than the end of 2026. These annualised savings are in addition to the cost savings already achieved within the management expectations previously provided for 2025, and are one of a number of actions we are taking towards achieving our medium-term target of a 70% cost:income ratio.

But further significant scaling is needed to bring the cost:income ratio down even more and to drive a jump in profits. What are the chances of this happening?

Potential for further scaling?

Clients & geographies

First, let’s look at who Jupiter’s clients are. Mostly, they are retail investors via various channels, including platform and adviser-led channels. Retail, wholesale and the investment trust channels make up 82% of AUM (end Q3-25). Institutional investors make up 18% of AUM. But a key strategy is to grow the institutional channel. Its share of AUM is up from 8% at the end of 2021.

Jupiter operates principally in the UK with international operating subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. So, it targets a broad range of international clients.

Products could be well positioned

Now let’s look at what investments Jupiter offers clients. The chart below is from its H1-25 results presentation. Systematic equity strategies are by far the largest product range (26% of AUM), followed by fixed income (16%). Multi-manager (fund-of-funds), global equities, Asian & EM equities, and UK equities each make up around 13% of AUM.

For those not familiar with the term, Systematic equities refers to rules-based or quantitative methods of investing. Here is the link to some of Jupiter’s strategies in this area. And here is an explanation from the Jupiter website:

Unlike discretionary equity strategies, the team employs an evidence-based approach to security selection. Rather than employing traditional analytical techniques, such as manually scrutinising company annual reports, meeting management teams, and studying by hand third-party analysis, the strategy uses computer-based techniques to analyse huge volumes of publicly available information, assessing global stocks against a number of stock selection criteria.

The Jupiter systematic investment process has been built with diversification at its core. It is data-led, rather than opinion-led. The systematic equities team applies a scientific methodology to testing hypotheses and works closely with Jupiter’s data science team.

What strikes me about Jupiter’s product range is:

• It looks well positioned to capitalise on any diversification play away from over-concentration in the mag-7.

• There may be attractions for investors looking for ‘anti-bubble’ plays: some systematic equity strategies are designed to take advantage of rising and falling markets (some strategies take short positions), and fixed income might be used as a diversification away from highly valued equities.

A continuing flood of money into the mag-7 and passive is probably bad for Jupiter’s growth. Diversification away from these trends might be good for it.

Jupiter is also moving into the active ETF space, which is seen as a potential high-growth area of asset management.

In terms of strategic positioning versus some of the bigger trends in asset management, McKinsey’s latest report, Asset management 2025: The great convergence, is certainly worth a read. It identifies the ETF play and a rotation away from global towards local exposures as growth areas - both of these trends might benefit Jupiter.

Flow outlook positive

Jupiter has certainly struck a positive tone recently in terms of client demand. In its H1-25 interim results it wrote:

Momentum in the Institutional channel continued throughout the period, but the uptick in overall flows was driven by an improvement in demand from retail clients. February saw the greatest level of net outflows from retail clients, but since then we have seen a consistent improvement month-to-month, ending with net positive retail flows in June. Encouragingly, this momentum has continued after period end and we are net positive across both channels so far in July.

And in its Q3 trading update it wrote:

The positive momentum that we saw in the latter part of the first half of 2025 continued into the third quarter.

The improvement in flows was driven by both an improvement in risk appetite amongst clients in the Retail, wholesale and investment trusts channel and ongoing strong investment performance across our differentiated capabilities, partially offset by net outflows in the Institutional channel.

There were total net outflows during the quarter of £0.5bn across the Institutional client channel… As previously stated, flows in the Institutional channel can be lumpy and non-linear, but with overall growth expected over longer periods. Increasing scale in the Institutional channel remains a core strategic focus, our pipeline and client activity remain strong, and we would expect to build on this momentum to drive growth in the medium term.

Investment performance will be key

In terms of investment performance, Jupiter has done relatively well versus peers (chart is from H1-25 results presentation).

But I reckon real scaling won’t happen because Jupiter outperforms active peers. Jupiter will scale only if a good proportion of clients and potential clients believe that its strategies will add value in a world of rapidly growing passive investment (a world of portfolio concentration in mega-caps).

I am absolutely in the camp that active managers still have a crucial role to play (many disagree with me). But there will only be a small proportion of active ‘winners’. There will be many ‘strugglers’. Which camp Jupiter will end up in - winners or strugglers - is one of the key questions any shareholder or potential shareholder needs to form a view on.

Latest acquisition will help it scale

Scale will certainly receive a boost when its latest acquisition closes (Jupiter says probably in Q1-26). The acquisition of CCLA Investment Management (announced in July 2025), which specialises in the charity sector, was very well received with a jump in Jupiter’s share price on the announcement.

This should add £15bn to Jupiter’s £50bn AUM base. And at a price tag of £100m (funded entirely from cash) for £13m of ‘underlying operating earnings’, it looks like a sensible price. The announcement also put a number to the cost synergies thought to be achievable: £16m per annum by 2027.

Does Jupiter’s potential justify its valuation?

So, I’ve briefly covered historical and recent AUM performance, and the potential for further scaling. The key question now is how the current position and future potential stack up against Jupiter’s current share price.

So let’s dive into valuation.

Lowly valued relative to peers

In a recent post I covered PE-ratio-based valuations in the asset management sector in some detail. I’d strongly recommend reading that if you haven’t already (link below). I think you might find it a real eye-opener.

The key message from that analysis, was that Jupiter’s ‘conventional’ PE ratio of c. 11 (a bit below the sector median of c. 13) could be very misleading. Note: those ratios are at the time of writing that post - at the time of publication of this post, Jupiter’s PE is around 14, the same as the sector median.

That was mainly because Jupiter has significantly more net cash and investments on its balance sheet than most other asset managers. In the above analysis, cash and investments alone made up around 60% of the share price, compared to a sector median of 37%.

If you adjust sector PE ratios to take account of these balance sheet items, and strip out the effect of some distorting exceptional items and non-cash accounting adjustments to earnings, I found that Jupiter’s ‘balance sheet adjusted’ PE ratio is half of the sector median. (full details in the above post ‘Is that chink of light an investment opportunity?’).

That suggests there is valuation headroom on a relative basis compared to other asset managers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Jupiter’s fundamental value is out of kilter with the share price. So let’s dig into that in a bit more detail.

Fundamental valuation: bullish and bearish scenarios

I’ve run two DCF models for Jupiter - a bullish scenario and a bearish one. I wouldn’t call these extreme scenarios. I think both are well within the realms of possibility. Here’s the summary between the two with more detailed explanations below.

Bullish scenario

For the bull case, the major assumptions for a 5-year explicit forecast are:

• At the end of 2025, net cash = c. £200m (30 Jun 25: £196m) and net on-balance-sheet investments (seeding of funds etc) = c. £200m (30 Jun 25 £204m).

• CCLA acquisition closes Jan 26.

• Jupiter attracts net flows (per year) of 1% of AUM. That would be a turnaround in Jupiter’s fortunes compared to the last few years, but as discussed earlier, the net flow outlook is looking more positive. And 1% per year is hardly a demanding net flow rate. In the last strong year for active management flows (2021), the median net flow rate for UK-listed managers was over 5%.

• Markets/investment performance contributes 5% per year to AUM.

• Average fee margin erodes by 2.5% per year (active managers’ fees are declining).

• Jupiter earns performance fees of 2.7% of investment management fees. That’s actually the lowest performance fee level of the last five years, so that assumption is probably conservative. But performance fees are a volatile source of income with no guarantee of being earned at all.

• Jupiter achieves a cost:income ratio of 75% in year 5 (it is targeting 70% in the ‘medium term’). In H1-25, this ratio was 82%. I can see it staying above 80% in 2026 but once the synergies from the CCLA acquisition start to be realised, and further scale benefits are realised, it should start to drop. Perhaps my 75% is also a touch conservative?

• For the terminal value of the DCF model I assume the business is acquired at a PE ratio of 15 (current sector median is around 14).

• Cash flows are discounted at a rate of 12%.

The cash flow projections of this bull case look like this.

That produces a per share fundamental value of 227p, around 47% above the share price at the time of publication of this post.

Bearish scenario

Now let’s look at a bear case

The major assumptions for a 5-year explicit forecast are:

• Markets experience a sharp pullback of 20% in late-25 or early-26 i.e. the “bubble bursts”.

• At the end of 2025, net cash = c. £200m (30 Jun 25: £196m) and net on-balance-sheet investments (seeding of funds etc) = c. £160m, reduced by the market pullback assumed above (30 Jun 25 £204m).

• CCLA acquisition closes Jan 26.

• Net flows average 0% of AUM.

• Markets/investment performance contributes 5% per year to AUM.

• Average fee margin erodes by 2.5% per year (active managers’ fees are declining).

• Jupiter earns no performance fees.

• Jupiter achieves a cost:income ratio of 80% in year 5 (it is targeting 70% in the ‘medium term’). In H1-25, this ratio was 82%. The market pullback (and consequent reduction in AUM levels results in the cost:income ratio spiking to the high-80s before declining to 80% in five years.

• For the terminal value of the DCF model I assume the business is acquired at a PE ratio of 12.5, lower than the bull case because of the lower growth rate (current sector median is around 14).

• Cash flows are discounted at a rate of 12%.

The cash flow projections of this bear case look like this.

That produces a per share fundamental value of 137p, around 11% below the share price at the time of publication of this post.

Here’s a side-by-side summary of the bull v bear cases:

Of course, these are just two scenarios based on a set of assumptions. You’ll have to make your own assessment on what seems most likely to you, and its impact on value. But to me, it still looks like the share price is on the low side of Jupiter’s fundamental value.

Feel free to comment below with your thoughts. And especially, let me know what assumptions you think are the most likely. I can run them through the model and post the impact on fundamental value.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to get notified when the next post of this comparison drops and to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in Jupiter Fund Management.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

In early October, I set the scene for wealth managers’ Q3-25 trading updates. It might be worth a quick look at that for some pre-Q3 context and historical data. I wrote:

Markets have provided a solid tailwind in Q3 of 2025 (expect a 5-6% contribution to AUM). Net flows will show us who’s winning the battle for clients’ capital

Now that Q3 updates are in, let’s see what happened.

It was a solid quarter for AUM growth.

Rising markets gave all players a boost.

But net flows continued to be dramatically different across the sector.

Here’s a few pointers for those looking to dig into flows and prospects in a little more detail.

• Tatton: I’d refer you to my recent Equity Development research note on this one. It’s flying high. Exceptional momentum, AUM +18% over H1-26

• PensionBee: I covered the Q3 update in some detail yesterday. This is now two stories. An existing (but still relatively early-stage) UK business, and a US business in its infancy. Here’s the link:

• AJ Bell: Going strong. CEO comment from the trading update: “a year of record growth, surpassing £100 billion in platform AUA and attracting over 100,000 new customers… record levels of platform customer growth and net inflows.

• Quilter: Net flow turnaround over the last 18 months or so continues. CEO comment from the trading update: “Our business is demonstrating strong consistency, delivering in excess of £2 billion of net flows in each quarter of this year. Notably, our 2025 year-to-date core net inflows of £6.7 billion already comfortably exceed the £5.2 billion total for 2024.”

• Integrafin: Growth continues. CEO comment from the trading update: “Net inflows in Q4 FY25 were up 28% year on year, bringing total FY25 net inflows to £4.4bn - an impressive 76% increase on FY24”.

• Aberdeen: Interactive Investor going strong. Adviser business not so much. Trading update here. (Asset management is a bigger part of Aberdeen’s business)

• St James’s Place: Solid quarter but with a word of caution from the CEO in the trading update: “with the third quarter having benefited from unseasonally high levels of client engagement and activity, and with the consumer environment uncertain, flows in the final quarter may therefore be less strong by comparison”.

• Schroders: Wealth management is a much smaller part of the business (asset management far larger) and is undergoing some changes. CEO comment from the trading update: “We have simplified Wealth Management, regaining full ownership of Cazenove Capital in exchange for our stake in Schroders Personal Wealth.”

• Brooks Macdonald: In my previous post I wrote: “Especially important will be stopping the bleeding of its (previously?) flagship and higher-margin Bespoke Portfolio Service product (around 44% of FUMA). It saw a welcome improvement in flows in Q2 … The lower-margin but fast-growing Managed Portfolio Service (now around 36% of FUMA) has seen remarkably consistent inflows.“ BPS flows were still negative in Q3 with MPS once again strong. So still work in progress. Trading update here.

• Rathbones: Weak flows again but Rathbones has been digesting the very large Investec Wealth & Investment acquisition which has contributed to this. New CEO Jonathan Sorrell has just taken over. It’s all eyes on what he has in store! Trading update here.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication and covered Tatton Asset Management as an analyst on behalf of Equity Development Limited. Read Equity Development’s research on Tatton here. And please read this link for the terms and conditions of reading Equity Development’s research.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

This is a short ‘what I expected’ versus ‘what was delivered’ on PensionBee’s Q3 trading update released on 22 October 2025. In my post on 5th October 2025,

I wrote..

This is now two stories. An existing (but still relatively early-stage) UK business, and a US business in its infancy.

For the UK, I’ll be looking for solid customer number and AUM growth. PensionBee added 10k new ‘invested customers’ in Q1 and 11k in Q2 on £7.6m of marketing spend over H1. Total invested customers were 286k at the end of Q2. So keep a lookout for customer number growth in the context of marketing spend. It should be closing in on 300k invested customers.

Net flows were £214m in Q1 and £209m in Q2 (around 14-15% annualised growth rate from net flows) so I’d like to see that momentum at least maintained. And PensionBee should have a stronger market tailwind than most wealth managers as its portfolios seem to have a higher equities allocation (a younger demographic with a long-term investment horizon for their pension pots).

For the US, we’re waiting for the first set of customer and AUA numbers to come in.

I’m less obsessed about the target of breakeven adjusted-EBITDA at this stage of growth. I’d like to see strong growth prioritised.

This is what was delivered:

Invested Customers

In the UK, up 11k in Q3 to 297k, higher than Q1 and the same as Q2. This was on marketing spend of £2.6m in the quarter, lower than the £3.8m quarterly average in H1. A good quarter for customer numbers. PensionBee said:

“We expect this momentum to carry through the fourth quarter and beyond.”

Net flows

Net flows were £201m, versus £214m in Q1 and £209m in Q2. Good, consistent but perhaps a touch disappointing give the strong growth in customer numbers. I’ll be looking for this to pick up a bit in the coming quarters.

In their presentation CFO Christoph Martin said that the age profile of new customers is slightly down at 39.5 average age (that was planned as part of the marketing strategy), with an average incoming pot size of £15.5k. Last year the average age was 40.5 with an average incoming pot of £17.5k. Two years ago the average age was ‘early-39s’ with an average pot size of £14.5k. So the lower age profile probably explains the slightly lower flows compared to new customers added.

AUA growth from markets

Very strong markets in the quarter boosted AUM by +£488m (+7.8%). That would be better than most expected.

Total AUA

Solid flows and very strong markets saw AUM +10.9% in the quarter to £6.98bn (end Q2: £6.30bn). That keeps the scale-train running.

Revenue

Up 32% year on year to £11.3m for Q3 (Q3 24: £8.6m). Excellent. Annual run rate revenue increased 35% to £46.4m Q3 25 (Q3 24 £34.4m).

Adjusted EBITDA

Just positive in the quarter at £1.3m. PensionBee UK achieved £2.4m (Q3 24: £1.5m). As I’ve said before though, this is very much dependent on marketing spend deployed. A good sign that scale benefits are still being achieved though is a 19% productivity improvement (Q3 25: 1,555 Invested Customers per staff member vs. Q3 2024: 1,305).

USA

It’s now getting very close to being ‘fully live’. Live testing is completed, which attracted $2m of AUA. PensionBee also said: “During the testing process, the Company attracted sizable accounts multiple times above its target of $50,000, indicating the potential for rapid asset accumulation as brand awareness grows.”

It launched its first US brand campaign featuring initial customers across major cities such as New York, Chicago and Seattle.

Longer term ambitions

PensionBee’s ambitions remain high.

Revenue Objectives:

• Reach: >£100m of Group Revenue in the short to medium term (by year end 2029).

• Exceed £250m of Group Revenue in the longer term (by year end 2034).

Profitability Objectives:

• Reach c.20% Group Adjusted EBITDA Margin in the short to medium term (by year end 2029).

• Reach c.50% Group Adjusted EBITDA Margin in the longer term (by year end 2034).

On balance, PensionBee looks on track to me, with markets providing an additional boost in the quarter.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in PensionBee.

TheInvestors.blog is not investment advice. Please read the disclaimer here.

The fortunes of Jupiter and Liontrust over the last few years make for a fascinating comparison in the UK-listed asset management space.

Both share prices were hard-hit in the market fall of early-mid-22 and mostly continued their decline over the next few years, with quite similar share price moves until the 2nd half of 2024, when they started to diverge.

In Apr 25, that divergence accelerated as Jupiter started a pretty remarkable recovery (albeit off a very badly beaten-up valuation). Liontrust didn’t.

Before we dig into share price moves and possible reasons behind them, I’ll give a quick overview of the two businesses which should explain why they make for such an interesting comparison.

Business profiles

Both are UK-listed active asset managers. So, they’re both fighting the passive juggernaut.

Both service predominantly retail-investors (mainly through adviser, wealth manager or platform channels) and have a smaller proportion of institutional clients.

Jupiter is bigger, with £47bn of assets under management (AUM), Liontrust manages £22bn.

Those client profiles mean they have similar-ish revenue margins. Jupiter averages 0.65% per annum of management fees on AUM, Liontrust 0.60%.

‘Underlying’ profit margins are a little higher at Liontrust, but not dramatically so. Liontrust reports an ‘adjusted operating margin’, which was just over 29% in the year to 31 Mar 25. Jupiter’s ‘underlying PBT’ as a percentage of net management fees (not an identical measure, but not far off) was around 24% in the year to 31 Dec 24. More on profits and margins later.

Recent AUM moves

Both have suffered AUM declines over the last few years.

And worryingly, those declines have mostly been a result of net outflows. Clients have been withdrawing more capital than they have been putting in.

There’s no doubt that these outflows spooked investors in both companies and were almost certainly the main reason for prolonged share price declines. Economies of scale were being lost so profit margins were declining, and investors were (are still?) questioning the future of these types of active asset managers (often in the context of the rise of passive).

Why the divergence? Why now?

So why the sudden jump in Jupiter shares, but not Liontrust? Primarily, Jupiter has seen a flow of tangible good news recently:

• The first good sign might have been observed from the chart above. Jupiter’s Q1-25 AUM update (on 24 Apr 25) showed a marked improvement in net flows, even though they were still negative. Management also struck a positive tone for future flows in that statement, despite the ‘liberation day’ turmoil taking place around that time.

• A May 25 announcement stated it had identified more cost savings than originally flagged.

• In Jul 25, the announcement of the acquisition of CCLA Investment Management (which specialises in the charity sector) was very well received. The acquisition should add £15bn to AUM. The price tag of £100m (funded entirely from cash) for £13m of ‘underlying operating earnings’, looks like a sensible price. And the announcement also put a number to the cost synergies thought to be achievable: £16m per annum by 2027.

• Flows actually did turn positive in Q2, reinforcing that positive sentiment and share price momentum.

• And then in Sep 25 Peel Hunt released a bumper upgrade titled: “Upgrades don’t come much bigger”.

• [Q3 AUM numbers were not yet released at the time of publication …]

All of the above built on a very depressed valuation and contributed to the rally seen year-to-date.

Meanwhile, at Liontrust, management have certainly been striking a positive tone for a little while now. But to date, it’s really only been about tone. That positivity has not yet flowed through to the numbers. The Q3 trading update said:

“Over the past few quarters, we have written about our belief that the market environment going forward will be more favourable for active managers. We are now seeing clients seeking to diversify away from the US and towards active management, and this is shown in an acceleration of interest in Liontrust strategies. We are having success among institutional investors and wealth managers, notably internationally. This includes new mandates as yet unfunded and being added to clients’ buy lists. This progress has been slower than as we had hoped, however…”

What next?

So can Jupiter’s price continue to rise? And will Liontrust start to recover too?

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be digging into the current fundamentals and the prospects of these two businesses, what that means in terms of fundamental valuation, and how that stacks up against current share prices.

Be sure to subscribe to TheInvestors.blog below to get notified when the next post of this comparison drops and to keep up to date with the UK asset and wealth management sectors.

Subscribe now

And if you think TheInvestors.blog is worth telling others about and sharing, I’d be most grateful if you do.

Share TheInvestors.blog

Disclosure: At the time of writing, Paul Bryant was a shareholder in a number of the companies mentioned in this publication.