Image via Wikipedia
By Emma Wall
BlackRock Gold & General has returned 732pc as the gold price has increased from just $220 an ounce in 1999 to a new record high of $1,225 an ounce this week.
In 1999 the fund was worth £70m now it is worth more than £2bn. Although performance would have played a part in its growth, BlackRock says new money has played a huge role too – it has regularly been a top seller in the second half of the decade.
BlackRock's Tony Stenning said: "At the start of the decade people had lost faith in real assets and the fools gold rush was for paper assets on ridiculously high earnings. We decided not to promote the fund too heavily. While we have always believed gold should be a small part of a diversified portfolio we did not want to see widows and orphans put their life savings into it. Gold can be volatile and we have had one hell of a roller-coaster at times."
Morningstar, which carried out the research, said it was not surprising that specialist funds featured at the top of the tables, rather than the mainstream UK funds, which are absent from the top 10. There is only one UK fund among the elite bunch and that comes from a boutique investment house, rather than one of the big players such as Fidelity or Jupiter. The fund is Marlborough Special Situations, managed by Giles Hargreave – he describes it as "relatively risk averse'' because it limits itself to a 2pc holding in any single company.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=99dee540-b9f8-414b-a0fe-6715da990126)
