Company: St James's Place
Personal AUM: N/A
Company AUM: £220bn
Career history
Joe has worked at some of the largest asset and wealth managers in Europe. Most notably, spending seven years with Aberdeen, where he was a fund manager with responsibility for Strategic Asset Allocation for MyFolio, one of the most successful multi-asset fund ranges in the UK.
Joe, who holds a Master's degree in Behavioural Science from the London School of Economics, is widely known across the industry as a behavioural finance expert and runs the popular blog: behaviouralinvestment.com.
His first book ‘The Intelligent Fund Investor' was published in November 2022 and focuses on the erroneous beliefs and behavioural biases that can lead investors astray and shows how we can make better decisions.
He is currently investment research director at St James's Place (SJP) with responsibility for manager selection and asset allocation.
Key areas of focus
A key milestone reached in 2025 was the launch of the Polaris Multi Index range. This builds on the existing success of our Polaris fund range - providing the same portfolio construction and asset allocation engine - but utilising index funds - tailored for SJP - as the underlying holdings. This was a landmark development for SJP and a critical pillar in our aim of utilising our scale and expertise to provide clients with choice and quality.
Our goal is to develop the SJP offering so that it provides the highest calibre investment offerings across the full range of strategy types. While the launch of PMI was perhaps the most high-profile work undertaken, we also continued to introduce new, high conviction managers to the SJP platform. For example, we restructured our Global Smaller Companies fund, adding six new managers.
A key tenet of our asset allocation approach in recent times has been that it is prudent to diversify away from a US equity market that was concentrated and trading on rich valuations. Although we believe in long-term thinking and not market timing, conditions in 2025 did serve to validate our view, which was contrary to consensus thinking when it was taken.
