James Giblin and Dorian Squires say they added roughly 5% equity across their model portfolios during the April 2025 tariff selloff, and the trade landed within a day of the market's low.
Most advisers who work with a model portfolio service see the fund selection. Giblin, who manages one of Legal & General's MPS propositions, and Squires, an investment director at Apollo Investment Management who has run portfolios for 32 years, spent most of their conversation on the part a client never sees: the weekly research meetings, the traffic-light ratings, and the joint decisions that let them act fast when a selloff actually shows up.
"We had implied volatility spike up above 60 and again like this is just a classic sign of when sentiment is extremely negative within markets."
Squires has been involved in managing investment portfolios for 32 years, across unitized funds, discretionary mandates and advisory roles; Giblin runs the fund-selection process behind the L&G MPS proposition Squires' clients are invested in.
I listened to the full episode so you can skip it. 34 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guests: James Giblin, fund manager running Legal & General's model portfolio service proposition, and Dorian Squires, investment director at Apollo Investment Management, who has managed investment portfolios for 32 years
🎙️ Host: Sarka Halas, content manager at L&G
📰 Published: 10 September 2026, on Legal & General's own site
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | ⏱️ 34 min | ✅ Time saved: 24 min
Key Takeaways
They rebalanced into equities the day the market bottomed during the April 2025 tariff selloff
Added around 5% equity across bespoke mandates, worth roughly 1% of attribution across the year
A traffic-light rating system decides which funds get in, with amber meaning yes but watched more closely
They exited a fund after its underperformance came from stock selection rather than style, and it later closed
L&G's scale bought a founder share class in perpetuity on a Nomura fund — a deal born from one joint meeting with the fund's CIO
Squires deliberately does not call clients during a selloff, because reaching out reads as a warning sign
Ongoing suitability under Consumer Duty is a perpetual obligation, not a one-time check, and that's where a well-run MPS earns its keep
Knowing when a rebalance is underway lets an adviser manage a client's withdrawal-timing expectations before it becomes a problem
1. Two Very Different Investors
Sarka Halas opened by asking each guest who they'd spend an hour with, past or present.
Giblin picked Masayoshi Son, prompted by reading "Gambling Man," a book about the SoftBank founder. "It's not necessarily the investment calls themselves, but it's that combination of his fascinating journey, the scale of his vision, someone who's experienced huge amounts of success as well as some very public failures," he said, adding that Son "forces you to zoom out" against an industry habit of getting caught up in daily market moves
Squires went back roughly two thousand years, to Crassus, a member of Rome's first triumvirate alongside Julius Caesar and Pompey. "You could also describe Crassus as perhaps the world's first value investor because he made his fortune by buying quite a lot of real estate and assets around Rome at a time where many things were being kind of sold off as there was some upheaval going on"
2. What Consistency Buys
Halas asked what a consistent fund-manager relationship looks like and why it matters more than advisers might assume.
Squires said consistency of process, not just of message, is what he screens for. "That's the real kind of underpin for me when I'm looking at what I would want to use for the end client is that consistency of not just process but approach and also of communication," he said, adding that it lets him have a dialogue with a manager before something needs to be enacted, rather than only after
Giblin framed it as a balance between structure and genuine partnership. The quarterly investment-committee cycle removes ad hoc, emotional decision-making, but he and Squires still talk honestly and directly about portfolio changes rather than L&G simply dictating positions into Squires' book
The output is meant to be auditable as well as good. "All this process is documented. It's repeatable. It's auditable," Giblin said, so the decisions behind a portfolio can be shown, not just asserted
3. Pitch to Portfolio
Halas asked Giblin to walk through how a fund reaches his radar and ends up in a client's portfolio.
Ideas arrive from L&G's own analyst pipeline or from Squires himself, ahead of the formal investment-committee process, in informal conversations the two hold regularly
A fund gets an initial review from the relevant asset-class specialist, then possibly a deeper dive, then a rating. "We give it either a green, amber or red, focusing on the risk of that fund, how likely it is to deviate from the benchmark and how confident we are in that manager," Giblin said — green clears it for inclusion, amber means yes with enhanced monitoring rather than a mark against the manager, and red rules it out in favor of a comparable alternative
The final check is portfolio-level, not just fund-level. Giblin's team looks at whether a new fund doubles down on existing style biases or overlaps with a position already held, weighing it both bottom-up and top-down rather than in isolation
Squires said what convinces him it isn't a box-ticking exercise is the consistency of the process itself, which he can compare against nearly three decades of watching managers whose discipline drifted over time. He has met not just Giblin but the sector specialists behind individual fund calls directly
4. Catching a Fund Early
Halas asked what ongoing due diligence looks like once a fund is already held — the part, she noted, where a proposition can say the right things without doing them.
A manager-research group meets weekly to review every fund already held, tracking unexpected performance in either direction, team changes, AUM shifts, and changes to process or philosophy, with a full annual update to each fund's research note
The goal is to be on the front foot rather than reactive. "We don't want to be surprised when we hear about a change within an individual fund," Giblin said
One held fund was exited after underperformance traced to stock selection rather than style — the sign that worried the team most. They met the manager, found the team struggled to justify some of its decisions and showed signs of losing confidence in its own philosophy, combined that with AUM falling below a comfortable level, and redrated and exited the position across the portfolios
"The fund subsequently underperformed and eventually closed," Giblin said. "Fortunately, we missed the worst of the underperformance and that was because we were being proactive"
5. Scale Buys Cheaper Shares
Halas asked what L&G's scale unlocks for advisers in terms of fund access and pricing.
Scale creates negotiating leverage for better-value share classes, especially across multiple mandates, while the flexibility of bespoke portfolios lets the team hold newer or smaller funds without becoming an outsized holder in the strategy
A Nomura fund is Giblin's example: a huge global fund with a small European presence, where L&G negotiated a founder share class in perpetuity. Squires had put the fund on L&G's radar, and the two then held a joint meeting where the Nomura chief investment officer was also in the room — something neither had expected
Squires called the joint session unusual and valuable in itself. It was the first time the two had sat down together at that stage of a fund review, rather than doing the work independently and comparing notes later, which he said was "a very very good eye opener" into how Giblin actually works and questions a manager
A second fund added at the most recent quarter also carries a founder share class, one that may not be usable across L&G's broader, larger-scale portfolios until they too can accommodate the capacity
6. Rebalancing at the Bottom
Halas turned to April 2025, when the announcement of sweeping tariffs produced a sharp equity selloff — "Liberation Day."
The trade came from L&G's asset-allocation side rather than fund selection, and it was executed as an ad hoc rebalance during the selloff. Implied volatility had spiked above 60, which Giblin called a classic sign of extremely negative sentiment
The size of the move: roughly 5% equity added across bespoke mandates and the core portfolio, on the portfolios in the middle of the risk range. Giblin said the team reached out to Squires to explain what it was doing and why before implementing it, and could act without needing individual client sign-off because of the discretionary powers the mandate carries
The timing worked out almost exactly. "It's great in hindsight when we get to can look back and we've pretty much added that at the bottom," Giblin said, putting the year's attribution from the move at roughly 1% for a balanced portfolio
They ran a similar playbook again during the recent Iranian conflict, this time landing within a few days of the market's turn rather than on the exact day — evidence, Squires said, that the process repeats rather than being a one-off
7. Why Squires Waits to Call
Halas asked Squires what the volatile period felt like from his side, and how he communicated it to clients.
He deliberately did not proactively contact clients during the selloff itself. "I'm a big believer in not sending something to clients or communicating to clients at a time when they wouldn't normally expect to hear from you," he said, reasoning that an unscheduled call can itself read as a warning sign — "does that mean we need to be worried?"
The groundwork is laid over years, not during the event. Squires said he educates clients in advance about how markets and news events typically play out, which is why he received no anxious calls during the selloff
He talks about the trade after the recovery instead, using the portfolio's own trade markers. The charts he shows clients mark rebalances with a square, and in this case the square landed "right at the bottom of the recovery kind of V" — a more instructive way, in his view, to cement the relationship's value than narrating events in real time
The point only works if fund selection and asset allocation are both good. "It's all very well being in the best fund in a certain area. But if that area is the worst performing area to be in, doesn't matter how good the fund is," Squires said
8. What the Partnership Frees
Halas asked what the arrangement means for Squires' business day to day.
It functions close to outsourcing the time-consuming legwork he can't do alone, without disingenuously calling it that. A specialist covering one sector is a fraction of the burden for L&G's larger team that it would be for Squires covering every sector himself
Rebalancing administration is the concrete example. Running it himself would require hiring and training staff to monitor it; leaving it with Giblin's team means it happens without that overhead
Having seen both sides of the business over 32 years — as a unitized fund manager, in a discretionary seat, and in an advisory role — Squires said the partnership lets him combine the best parts of each rather than having to pick one
The same structure lets him demonstrate consistency across every client for Consumer Duty purposes: that everybody is monitored and looked after on the same basis
9. Consumer Duty's Burden
Halas asked where advisers are finding it hardest to demonstrate ongoing suitability, and where a well-run MPS helps.
The core problem is that ongoing suitability isn't a single point-in-time check — it's a perpetual obligation, with a heavy load falling on reporting, record-keeping and consistent client communication, particularly where clients pay ongoing fees that need to be justified
A disciplined MPS lets an adviser hand off that documentation burden with confidence rather than ignore it, freeing them to focus on what the end client actually cares about — that the portfolio is looked after and the plan is on track, not whether a holding is a global fund or a Japanese one
Giblin said the governance an investment process already produces maps directly onto what regulators expect for Consumer Duty: quarterly IC documentation, fund-rating rationale, and a clearly documented trade rationale form the audit trail that supports the evidencing requirement, alongside performance itself
Squires gave a concrete example of where communication prevents a Consumer Duty problem: withdrawal timing. If a client asks to pull money out around the same time L&G is mid-rebalance, an MPS that doesn't communicate well might process the withdrawal without warning the adviser, adding a week or two the client doesn't expect. Knowing a rebalance is underway lets Squires manage that expectation up front rather than explain a delay after the fact
Bonus Insights
Squires flagged his own tenure as the reason he trusts a consistent process over a pitch. He noted that two weeks before the recording marked the start of his 32nd year in investment portfolios, across unitized funds, a discretionary seat and an advisory role, which he said means he has watched plenty of managers' processes drift from what they originally said
Giblin's own framing of the Nomura example doubled as a broader point about deal flow: the best opportunities in fund selection increasingly come through relationships, not screens. Squires had already flagged the fund independently, and it was the joint meeting — not either firm's research alone — that produced the founder share class
Giblin and Squires' bottom line is that a managed portfolio service's value sits less in any single fund pick than in the discipline and communication of the partnership behind it — the thing that let both firms act together, and quickly, the one time in 2025 that mattered.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Nomura (The global fund manager whose fund Squires flagged and L&G negotiated a founder share class in perpetuity for, after a joint meeting with the fund's CIO)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Gambling Man – Lionel Barber (The book about SoftBank's Masayoshi Son that Giblin had just finished reading when he picked Son as his hour-with-any-investor answer)
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