BlackRock's Plackett ditches pharma for small caps

BlackRock's Richard Plackett, manager of the £1.5bn UK Special Situations fund, has been rotating out of large-cap defensive stocks and adding to small and mid caps, reflecting his more optimistic outlook on the world economy.

The head of UK small- and mid-cap investment has been selling down blue-chip pharma stocks over the past three months and reinvesting at the smaller end of the cap scale, as the confidence shock in the eurozone last August has not been as bad as he feared. “In the first half of 2011 we were buying quite a few of the more defensive large-cap stocks, largely because the small- and mid-cap areas had had a good run and we were getting a bit more worried about the world. “We bought quite a few pharmaceutical stocks then, but as we became more positive about the market earlier this year, it...