Picking an investment fund for your pension or ISA is no mean feat with thousands of products available to UK investors.

An obvious place to start is the performance track record of the fund.

But this isn’t always as straightforward as you’d think. Chopping and changing of roles by fund managers means the stellar record on a particular fund may not be down to the skill of the manager at the helm today.

That’s why wealth manager Tilney Bestinvest has carried out an in-depth performance survey, scrutinising the long-term track record of some 490 fund managers across their entire carrier history managing money to come up with the top 100 equity managers in the UK.

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Where a manager has worked at multiple firms across their career, Tilney Bestinvest combined the records of the funds they managed within a particular sector – for example UK All Companies or Europe ex UK. In cases where they have managed more than one fund at the same time within a sector, the researchers used a blended return.

The list includes managers who work for big City firms, but also smaller fund houses that aren’t household names.

Top managers

According to the survey, Angus Tulloch of Stewart Investors, part of First State Investments, comes top of the list. He manages the Stewart Investors Asia Pacific and Asia Pacific Leaders funds.

In second place is last year’s winner, Giles Hargreave of Hargreave Hale, who has managed the flagship Marlborough Special Situations fund since 1998, as well as Marlborough UK Micro-Cap Growth and Nano-Cap Growth funds.

Coming in at number three is Mark Slater of Slater Investments, manager of MFM Slater Growth and MFM Slater Recovery.

Neil Woodford soared up the rankings moving from number 23 last year to number five and taking the top spot for a UK income manager.

Mark Barnett, who took the reins of the Invesco Perpetual Income and High Income funds from Woodford when he left the firm, completed the top five.