The departure of Jeremy Gleeson from Axa, where he was the long-serving manager of the Framlington Global Technology fund, caused many in the market to ponder their exposure.

Darius McDermott, managing director at Fund Calibre and investment adviser to the Chelsea range of multi manager fund, said his firm has removed its elite rating from the fund while they await clarity on the future management of the strategy.  

James Crocker, who runs the model portfolio service at Albert E Sharp, sold out of the fund before Gleeson's exit in the second quarter of this year, based on a desire to own a more value-focused technology fund. 

That leaves the fund owned by two of the allocators we monitor, which means it has been overtaken by Sanlam Global Artificial Intelligence as the most popular tech fund in our database.

It’s £1.2bn in size and bottom quartile over the past one and three years. 

McDermott said most open-ended technology funds have struggled in performance terms in recent years as they can’t  have more than 10 per cent of the assets in any one stock. 

That forces such funds to be underweight Nvidia and Apple in particular, giving tracker funds a definite advantage as those products can own the market weighting of those stocks, when those stocks are going up. 

A world in which those stocks fall relative to other technology companies would see a reversal, with the index funds selling and the active funds able to buy. 

No tracker fund is owned by more than one of the allocators we monitor.

Of course the other issue is that the Axa fund is heavily exposed to US big tech - it is well overweight the US compared to its peers (Sanlam's AI fund, for example, has chunky exposures to Japan and Europe). And in a world where exposure to US big tech can be obtained by simply tracking the American market, what is the point of an actively managed tech fund with such an exposure?