Company: AJ Bell
Personal AUM: N/A
Company AUM: £9.5bn
Career history
Paul began his career in 2010 with a global investment bank holding various roles across the business.
In 2016, he then joined Square Mile Investment Research as a fund analyst. Paul covered multiple sectors during his time at Square Mile, increasingly applying the firm's research as a consultant to clients across advisers, consolidators and asset managers.
In 2023, he joined AJ Bell to lead the firm's investment research team. As a team, it aims to ensure all clients (direct and advised) have great investment funds from which to build portfolios.
Within his role, Paul also sits on the investment business' asset allocation and portfolio implementation forums, allocating its £9.5bn multi-asset proposition across funds and MPS.
Key areas of focus
Over the last 12 months, we have added alternative funds to our asset allocation mix for some of the adviser firms we partner with. We settled on equity long/ short and managed futures as the sub-categories that offered the best combination of low correlation to wider markets, attractive prospective returns and lower volatility.
As part of this work, we added Jupiter Merian GEAR to our equity long/short rostrum, alongside incumbent Tellworth UK Select.
We also brought on board two managed future funds in iMGP DBi Managed Futures and MontLake DUNN WMA. Across these four funds we think we have identified a really compelling blend of uncorrelated returns for client portfolios.
Also over the year, we partnered with Artemis as seed investors in the Artemis SmartGARP Emerging Markets ex China fund at launch, providing our clients access to a hugely successful team and process at a great cost. The launch comes following our separating out China from broader emerging markets in our modelled asset classes early in 2025.
