Next week investors in Alliance Trust and Witan will vote on whether their trusts should merge with, in the words of the Spice Girls, two becoming one.

Ahead of the meeting, this week has seen more details of the proposed merger and one of the things which caught our eye was the fact the merged trust - to be called Alliance Witan - would benefit from Alliance Trust's "best-in-class investment management" (these are the words of Alliance Trust).

Essentially, the merged trust would adopt Alliance Trust's strategy of outsourcing chunks of its portfolio to a range of different fund managers.

Now since Alliance Witan aspires to be a "one stop shop" for retail investors' equity exposures, we thought we would take a look at how the choices made by this "best-in-class" management compares to those taken by the allocators we track.

Alliance Trust has a significantly larger exposure to US equities than allocators on average at nearly 60 per cent, compared to 31 per cent (this is a percentage of allocators' equity exposures with fixed income and alts excluded - as a percentage of their total portfolio allocators have a US exposure of 17 per cent).

Another key difference is the fact that allocators continue to be significantly overweight UK equities - despite the fact this overweight has been falling in recent years.

Alliance Trust has an exposure of around 7 per cent while UK equities make up 23 per cent of allocators' equity exposures.