We've refreshed our Favourite funds list

At AJ Bell Youinvest, we're proud to offer a huge range of possible investments – including over 2,000 funds and shares from 24 markets. But we’re also acutely aware how time-consuming, not to say bewildering, it can be to sift through these choices to find the right one for you.

Many of our customers have told us they'd like some help narrowing down the options.

That’s where the AJ Bell Favourite funds list comes in. The aim of this list is to make it easier for you to build your portfolio – by providing you with a filtered, high-quality, researched list of funds that we believe represent some of the best investment options in the market. Whether you’re looking for a simple, low-cost passive solution that tracks the FTSE All Share Index, or for a high-quality fund that invests in emerging markets, or for anything in between, our Favourite Funds list has been designed to be able to help.

So we can identify the best funds in a wide variety of different areas, we use a rigorous investment research approach. This detailed analysis, by our in-house experts, helps us pick out both low-cost passive investments that look to track the performance of a specific benchmark, and actively managed funds that look to outperform a stated benchmark.

When deciding whether a passive investment makes the cut, we assess a wide range of criteria. These include the size of the strategy, how well it tracks its benchmark, and how much it costs. When assessing an active fund, we look at the track record of the fund managers, how they manage risk, how likely they are to achieve their stated objective, and how much it costs. All the while, we’re looking to identify high-quality funds, passive or active, that offer great value for money.

Once a fund is chosen for the Favourite funds list, we continue to monitor its performance and assess whether it still deserves a place on the list. Should any fund need to be changed – which could be for a variety of reasons – we ‘ll update our website to let you know.

How we’ve updated the Favourite funds list

Since its launch in April last year, the Favourite funds list has proved popular with investors. Recently, we made a few changes to further improve the quality of the list and make it easier for you to find the find the fund you’re looking for.

We’ve undertaken an in-depth review of all the funds that appear on the list, and as a result, swapped out some funds that we felt were no longer the best available in the market. While we believe these funds remain high quality, we’ve replaced them with funds that – in our view – have a better chance of achieving their stated objective for the costs being charged. Following these changes, the Favourite funds list features a number of new funds, some in areas that weren’t represented before.

We’ve also updated the filter tool to give you more clarity on the type of fund you’re looking for. We’ve added extra categories for you to choose from, including ethical and absolute return, that should make it easier for you to narrow down your choices.

We hope that as a result of these changes, the Favourite funds list is even easier to navigate, and even more effective at helping you choose the right investments for your portfolio.

The AJ Bell Favourite funds list is designed to help you choose your investments, but isn’t a personal recommendation. You may own funds not included on the list – this doesn’t mean we recommend that you sell them. If you’re not confident about making your own financial decisions, or are looking for advice, you should speak to a suitably qualified financial adviser.