Last week we looked into how alternative funds - which are supposed to act as uncorrelated buffers in portfolios - fared during the recent market volatility.

Some did their job, while others...well, let's move on...

This time around, we thought we’d take a look at global equity funds - the guys who should be providing the alpha - to see how they held up. 

The IA Global sector is a mixed bag, and about the only thing the funds have in common is their underlying companies do business on planet Earth.

We suppose that’s why the best performing fund since July 1 is a gold producers tracker, perhaps triggered by a flight to safety. 

The iShares Gold Producers ETF returned 11 per cent in the six weeks or so since the second half of the year began, with the next-best performers all utilities trackers as well. 

Though allocators are largely loathe to own gold at all across portfolios, Charles Stanley is among the names to buy shares in mining companies, which can gear the price of gold and magnify both gains and losses.

There will also be some satisfaction in knowing the minimum volatility funds are doing their job: the iShares, xTrackers and UBS offerings here were all among the top 20 performers.

The most impressive active fund over the period was Lazard Global Equity Franchise, a fund with a big focus on quality and which avoids particularly cyclical sectors. It took home more than 5 per cent and is held by just two allocators we cover. 

Havelock Global Select, a fund which is owned by four DFMs in our database, did less well but still can be relatively pleased with the 3 per cent it returned over the period.

It’s worth noting that the MSCI World was pretty much entirely flat over the period, so anything above 24 basis points can be considered a success. 

What did less well?

As the most recent copy of Bestinvest’s ‘Spot the Dog’ report points out, the global sector has been a particularly tough place to be an active manager. 

43 funds worth a combined £26bn in assets were put on the report’s naughty list, and they said this was in part down to managers’ natural underweight position in technology versus the benchmark. 

In fact, we recently covered the extent to which North American equities populate our DFMs’ 10 most popular active global funds. The average stands at 44 per cent and considerably lower than the MSCI World’s average of 70 per cent. 

A key driving factor was that many funds have a sustainable bent, which has suffered over the past few years due to their inability to capitalise upon rising oil and gas prices stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Bestinvest.

At the very bottom of the leaderboard, however, the worst performers were in fact the more specialist beasts of the investment universe, that presumably fell victim to the brief tech sell off. 

Particular malchance was reserved for mandates along the lines of artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and consumer brands. 

Fortunately very few of these are owned by the DFMs we cover in significant numbers. The worst performer in our database was Gam Star Disruptive Growth which lost 4.5 per cent and is only owned by one allocator.

The WisdomTree Blockchain ETF fell a whopping 15 per cent, perhaps adding to the argument in favour of gold over cryptocurrencies as a safe haven in times of crisis.