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Barclays Funds List

About our Funds List

Selected by Barclays’ investment specialists, it is a list of funds that have built solid reputations and established sound investment processes.

Smart Investor doesn’t offer financial advice, so you need to decide how to invest your money. The criteria outlined here can only help you narrow down the choice. Investing in funds is like any other type of investment. The value of your investment can fall as well as rise. You might not get back the amount you invest.

Selected by our investment specialists, the Barclays Funds List is a list of funds that have built solid reputations and established sound investment processes.

What’s the Barclays Funds List?

With thousands of different funds to choose from, it can seem like a big task to find the ones right for you. The Barclays Funds List is one way to help you narrow down the huge range of options available.

How our list can help

When it comes to investing, one of the most important things is diversification – spreading your money so it’s invested in different asset classes (shares, bonds and cash), geographical regions and sectors. This can help to reduce the overall risk because you’re not dependent on how a certain company, sector or market performs, lessening the chance of you losing money and hopefully helping to position yourself for long-term investment success.

The Barclays Funds List is made up of funds from each of the investment sectors we believe are key for building a diversified portfolio. As well as including funds from different sectors, our list includes different types of funds – active, trackers and our own Barclays Multi-Manager funds.  They are run in different ways so you can mix together multiple types of funds, depending on what you’re looking to achieve. Also, some sectors and funds are higher risk than others, so having a range of different styles can help when it comes to managing risk.

The list isn’t exhaustive and the funds aren’t personal recommendations to you; it’s up to you to decide if any of them are right for you.

Find out more about the importance of diversification.

What’s on our list?

Remember to spread your money across different countries and types of industries – so that when one isn’t performing so well, another may be performing better. Then consider which fund approach fits best with your objectives.

Active funds

Our active funds selection is made up of funds run by third-party managers who use their expertise and research to decide which investments a fund will hold, in an attempt to provide investors with returns that are better than the general performance of the market they’re focused on. With years of experience, and usually direct access to the people running the companies they invest in, fund managers make their investment decisions with insight that few individual investors can match.

The active funds in our list go through a rigorous selection process and once we’ve chosen them, we constantly monitor the funds to make sure we’re still happy to keep them on the list.

Find out more about how we select our active funds

Tracker funds

Our tracker funds selection is a group of funds where the performance of your investment will closely follow that of a specific market or index, such as the FTSE 100, and usually at a much lower cost to you than an active fund. Instead of having a manager who tries to pick investments to beat the markets, tracker funds – also known as index or passive funds – simply follow the overall performance of the index they’re tracking.

The tracker funds on our Barclays Funds List are selected solely on cost – they're simply the cheapest available tracker fund we offer in each sector where a relevant product is available. We review the fund selection every six months, in June and December.

Barclays Multi-Manager funds

Our Multi-Manager funds selection is a group of funds run by our own experts and instead of the Barclays manager choosing individual shares and bonds to invest in – their job is to choose which other world-leading, specialist fund managers to select to look after parts of the fund. 

Each of these fund managers will have a different approach to investing, and we'll balance allocation to each so that the fund’s investments have the potential to perform in all kinds of different economic conditions.

Multi-Manager funds can be a good starting point if you’re new to investing, as they enable you to spread your risks in building exposure to a single market, but they’re normally more expensive than other options.

Keeping the Barclays Funds List up to date

Through our ongoing monitoring of the selected funds, we may decide to remove or add funds from or to the Barclays Funds List. To see changes to the list, please check our additions and removals page.

Looking under the bonnet of funds

Our funds list helps narrow down the huge range of funds available, but it’s still essential you fully review your choices. Some key things to look at are:

What's the ongoing cost?

The combined cost of the manager’s fee for managing the investments, plus other key costs of running the fund are deducted from the fund’s assets. The total of these is the ongoing cost, and you can find this on the fund’s Key Investor Information Document (KIID). This figure may vary over time.

What is a KIID risk score?

The risk score of a fund – as used in its KIID – reflects the significance of the fund’s share price fluctuations, usually over five years. Historical performance is not a reliable indicator of the future. A fund’s score may change over time. A fund in the lowest category of risk doesn’t mean it’s risk free. Generally, the higher the risk category, the more price movement experienced by the fund, and the greater potential for higher returns but also the higher the risk of losing money.

Accumulation or income units

Income units of a fund will pay out any income generated by the fund as a cash payment, normally made every six months. Accumulation units on the other hand, retain any income generated within the fund, with the aim of increasing the value of your investment. Find out more about accumulation versus income.

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If you have any questions, you can give us a call on 0800 279 36671

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The value of investments can fall as well as rise. You may get back less than you invest. Tax rules can change and their effects on you will depend on your individual circumstances.

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Smart Investor

To choose and manage your own investments from a range of funds, shares, ETFs and bonds, get started today by simply opening up an Investment (Stocks & Shares) ISA, Investment Account or SIPP Account with Smart Investor.