Fidelity has promoted David Stewart, its emerging markets head, to become chief lieutenant to Richard Horlick, managing director of its £30bn (E49.8bn) global business.

Stewart will be shadowing Horlick until April, when the appointment takes place. He will increasingly become liaison man with Fidelity's £20bn pan-European client base, although Horlick will retain certain personal relationships. Horlick will continue to chair asset allocation strategy and retains responsibility for keeping global institutional portfolios in line with strategy. Stewart will now also contribute to asset allocation and will keep a special eye on client wishes. Simon Fraser, who keeps analytical processes up to speed, is the third lead member of the global top team. Meetings with regional desk heads would include checks on sector and stock bets: "If a portfolio constructor holds a particular stock which is on our analysts' sell list we would expect to hear a good reason for the decision,' says Horlick. "Stewart's promotion is designed to deal with the evolution of our growth,' says Horlick. He compares the development to evolution with the way in which Peter Lord has moved in to lead ex-US business for US clients, on the back of strong performance monitored by Horlick over five years. Stewart started his career driving trucks in Australia for Swire Group. He later became emerging markets broker for James Capel and moved to Fidelity six years ago. Stewart's emerging market institutional fund has outperformed significantly. During that period he has also had to take over the running of certain Fidelity retail funds from Richard Hazlewood, after his overweighting in Malaysia before the Asian crisis caused problems. It is ironic that now the funds are back in shape Stewart sees strong arguments to take a short-term bet on Malaysian recovery.Stewart's promotion coincides with another year of strong performance for Fidelity's balanced funds, which returned 25% against an estimated 20.9% from the WM 2000 benchmark. Q4 also saw outperformance against median. Over five years, the firm outperformed by 2.2 percentage points. Fidelity's pooled fund did slightly less well by producing 24.3% before fees, equivalent to 23.5% after them. But stock picking generally provided significant outperformance. Fidelity refuses to compromise on fees across the world. They start at 0.75% for the first £25m, falling to 0.25% beyond £50m: performance-related fees are also available. A few Japanese public pension schemes will not give Fidelity business because of its fee stance. Fidelity has also refused to get involved with Sweden's ultra-low stakeholder pension. It is unlikely to wheel out its US hedge fund process in the UK until it can be justified in terms of fee opportunity. But UK pension funds are now happy enough with performance fees to take on Fidelity given its performance consistency. Its balanced offerings remain popular: specialist work is also being won.