Funds: the summer rally favours Europe (+9.1 per cent). Italia is playing catch-up with its bonds

The buoyant summer on the stock markets is helping to keep the momentum of European investment funds intact in 2026. The figures for the first nine months of the year show an average gain of 9.1 per cent for investors in each of the products distributed by asset management companies across the continent, according to data contained in the report published by Tosetti Value, one of Europe’s leading multi-family offices in Europe, which reviews the returns and costs of all UCITS products distributed in at least one European country, classified as long-term funds, both active and passive (excluding ETFs) and managed by the top 250 firms ranked by assets under management.

Behind the broad confirmation of the previous half-yearly figures, there are in fact differing trends across the main investment categories. The at times still rapid rise in share indices – many of which reached record levels between July and September – was offset by the downward trend in the bond market. This latter trend is clearly reflected in the concurrent movements in government bond yields, which, for ten-year maturities, rose by an average of over 80 basis points, with peaks of over one percentage point for Italian BTps and French OATs, reaching multi-decade highs in most cases.

The largely divergent behaviour observed across the two asset classes is most clearly evident in the weighted average returns achieved by individual investment firms. At the top of the hypothetical continental ranking, as was the case three months ago, are two fund managers with portfolios heavily weighted towards equities: the Swedish public pension fund Sjunde (+17.1% year-to-date) and Northern Trust (+15.8%). Even the sector’s giants, BlackRock and Vanguard, can boast above-average returns (11.9 per cent and 11.4 per cent respectively) thanks to the support provided by a very high equity allocation (71.7 per cent and 62.8 per cent) and extremely low ongoing charges (0.54 per cent and 0.16 per cent compared with the European average of 0.81 per cent). Pimco’s products, by contrast, recorded negligible returns (+0.7%), which is entirely consistent with the Californian investment firm’s specialisation in fixed income.

This same trend ultimately also affects the returns offered by Italian companies, which have averaged 3.8 per cent since the start of the year, with the gap between them and their continental competitors having widened in recent months, given that returns stood at 5.2 per cent at the end of June. The key factors here, in addition to a more disadvantageous fee structure (with average annual running costs of 1.47 per cent), are the lower allocation to equities, which account for 28.3 per cent of domestic portfolios compared with 54.3 per cent in Europe. It is no coincidence that the best performances were achieved by Mediolanum (+6 per cent), which is relatively more exposed to stock market indices (53.9 per cent) than other companies, whilst at the opposite end of the spectrum is BancoPosta, with a return limited to 1.1 per cent due to its reduced equity exposure of 11.4 per cent.

Overall, Tosetti Value’s analysis puts the total assets under management by the top 250 investment firms at just over 10,600 billion euros, with a high degree of concentration. The top 30 firms account for 55.8 per cent of total assets under management (5,915 billion), whilst 770.4 billion are managed through funds of funds. In this context, Italia plays a relatively marginal role, with only the Intesa Group featuring amongst the continent’s leading operators in the sector and 661.5 billion under management, accounting for just 6.2 per cent of total European assets under management.