At the end of 2015 we selected four areas we believed would perform well during the year ahead - Europe, Japan, Emerging markets and Asia ex-Japan and wealth preservation. And despite the market reaction to a number of surprises including the UK's vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president, Japanese, European and emerging market equities all surged, as instead of hitting new lows, markets rebuffed the newsflow to maintain stellar performance.
The three regional markets we selected all posted double-digit returns and performed far better on average than the FTSE 100 and FTSE All-Share. The funds we tipped also returned an average of 18.3 per cent over one year to 28 December 2016, easily beating the FTSE All-Share index's 15.4 per cent.
Japan