Morgan Stanley has soft-closed its Global Brands fund to retail investors in a bid to preserve the performance of the top-performing portfolio.

The fund, run by Peter Wright, William Lock and team has become increasingly popular among leading multi-managers - including Jupiter's Merlin team - in recent months.

Aiming to outperform the MSCI World over a market cycle, the fund is a concentrated portfolio of global franchises and includes companies such as Nestle, Unilever and Microsoft.

The Global Brands OEIC has £500m in assets, while the offshore SICAV is now some $9bn in size, prompting the group to restrict investment.

"The fund is reaching capacity. We are restricting the purchase of retail share classes, but certain institutional share classes remain open," a spokesperson said.

Global Brands is top of the IMA Global sector over three and five years, according to Morningstar. Over the three years to 23 November, the fund returned 51.5% compared with an average return of 17.7% for the peer group.

Over five years it has returned 72.7% compared with a sector average return of 13.6%.

Multi-managers to have invested in the fund include Rathbones' David Coombs and the Jupiter Merlin team, who added a position to their £1.7bn Merlin Growth and newly-launched Merlin Conservative portfolios earlier this year.