LGIM to merge Japanese fund into tracker

Legal & General Investment Management plans to merge its £34m Japanese trust into its tracker equivalent, with manager Andrew Nagele and team set to leave the group.

The fund - which was launched in October 1986 - is bottom-quartile over three and five years, significantly underperforming the group's £357m Japan Index fund.

It currently has just £4m of external money and the merger will see its AMC drop from 1.5% to 65bp.

Nagele joined LGIM in 1990 and is responsible for managing the Japanese equities team.

LGIM's Japan Index fund is top-quartile over five years, up 12.4%.

"At Legal & General Investments, we remain of the firm belief that both active and passive solutions can co-exist, " LGIM sales director Ben Waterhouse says.

"Managed correctly, these approaches complement each other to meet a range of investor needs.

"But we only want to offer active fund management where we have a distinct competitive advantage to deliver outperformance. In Japan, we simply did not have the competitive advantage to continue with the active approach."