Man Group drops on Exane downgrade

Man Group slumped as Exane BNP Paribas downgraded the stock to ‘neutral’ from ‘outperform’.

“We see scope for a slowdown in flows as a consequence of flagging performance at AHL and at GLG. Performance issues are also likely to impact the long term outlook for management fee margins.”

The bank said the continued sluggish fund performance, impacting the outlook for performance fees and fund flows, prompts material downgrades to its earnings expectations, adding that the amount of surplus capital for materially accretive deals is limited.

Exane cut its earnings per share estimates for FY16 by 15% and for FY17 by 27% as it pointed to lower performance fees, negative performance contribution in the fourth quarter, softer Q4 flow expectations and the stronger US dollar.

“We estimate that AHL Diversified is down -8.1% year-to-date, AHL Alpha -3.5% YTD and AHL Dimension - 3.9% YTD.

“While the relative performance (second quartile) is still decent, this is a bleaker picture than at the half-year results when the same funds were up +5.4%, +0.6% and +0.1% respectively.”

Exane highlighted Man Group’s acquisition of Aalto Invest and said that while it is a good, well-structured deal, there is limited near-term earnings contribution.

Exane has a 120p price target on the stock.

At 1220 GMT, the shares were down 3.8% to 119.10p.