Every year since 2006, the independent Paris-based fund rating company Fundclass analyses European funds and fund managers to determine those that have performed the best. The firm defines and computes the risk profile of European funds, then creates “peer groups” of funds that have a similar risk profile, ensuring that funds in a certain category can be compared with one another. Fundclass identifies the best risk/return ratio within the same peer group, then identifies the best performers over multiple periods of time, compiling rankings every quarter as a good fund should be able to perform consistently well. At the end of the process, each fund gets a quantitative rating.
At the 19th edition of the European Funds Trophy, held on 6 March 2025, eight Luxembourg asset managers were recognised for their performance the previous year. Three of them--RBC Bluebay Asset Management, Candriam and JP Morgan Asset Management--were the winners of their respective categories at the .
“The most important message is that compared to previous editions, we noticed that all the managers showed a lot of creativity and escaped from the traditional management routes to create funds on strategies that--until then--were not very used or not very well known,” Fundclass CEO François Chauvet explained to Paperjam before the ceremony.
“There are a lot of new things, like new types of currencies, like artificial intelligence, like new mixes of strategies,” said Chauvet. “So in order to group funds together in a way that allows them to be compared, we created new homogeneous categories, in which there are not one or two funds, but several dozen funds.” The category of new currencies--like bitcoin--performed very well, he noted, but that came with much higher volatility as well.
More broadly, despite political events, “the stock markets have performed very, very well. They’ve all broken records,” he added. Apart from a dip in early 2022 linked to the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “the markets have never done so well. We are--in almost all areas--at historic highs.”