DENMARK – Janus provided four of the five worst performing sub-funds on ATP’s new Folkebørsen electronic fund marketplace in 2005.

It came as just 4,500 people, mostly well-off men, signed up for the pension fund’s new platform in the year. The idea is that account holders will be able to invest their savings in collective investment schemes via an Internet portal.

The Janus Flexible Income Fund A2 EUR and US Short-Term Bond Fund A2 EUR returned a negative 1.1% and 1.0% respectively. Also in the bottom five were a Janus high-yield funds and a global equity fund. The five was rounded out by the UBS (Lux) bond Fund – Absolute Return at 0.9%. Janus is the largest fund provider on the platform, which launched on January 1 2005.

The numbers compare with an overall return of 31.3% for clients who chose to investment funds themselves.

The highest return fund was the Jyske Invest Latinamerikanske Aktier (Latam stocks) which came in at 73.3%. The Alfred Berg Rusland (Russia) fund returned 72.4%.

“This is only one side of the picture of course as we have 24 funds in total on the platform including some of the best performing US equity funds (JWF US Risk Managed Core for example) although most of the flows and appetite in 2005 have been for emerging markets, Danish equities and bonds,” said a Janus spokesman.

The “law of averages” meant there would be more Janus funds in either top or underperforming categories – although none of its funds were in the top five by returns or popularity.

The spokesman also pointed to the underperformance of fixed income as an asset class and that it was just a one-year snapshot.

“In the course of 2005, a total of 4,500 SP clients availed themselves of their new opportunities under Folkebørsen,” ATP, Arbejdsmarkedets Tillægspension, said in its 2005 annual report.

“Most of them were men with above-average deposits,” it added.

They mostly opted for equity-based sub-funds – taking on most risk than clients who left their deposits to be managed by ATP.

The fund with most take-up was the domestic small-cap fund ATP Invest DK Aktier, chosen by 1,086 clients. It returned 69.8%.

ATP acknowledges that the public’s knowledge of the SP scheme and Folkebørsen “remains very low”.