Judging by the response from independent financial advisers, Fidelity seems to have handled its latest big announcement better than its last. The news that Sanjeev Shah is to take over the running of the rump of Anthony Bolton’s Fidelity Special Situations fund was met with widespread, if not total, approval this week by the industry.

This is in stark contrast to what happened last June, when Fidelity unveiled Jorma Korhonen as the man to take over half of Mr Bolton’s fund, since spun off as Fidelity Global Special Situations. Derided as an unknown, Mr Korhonen was effectively written off by many advisers.

Mr Shah, as a former manager of the Fidelity UK Aggressive fund, is well known, and highly rated, by many advisers. But does he deserve such praise? UK Aggressive certainly turned in a stonking 89 per cent during the nearly three years he ran the fund, around 28 percentage points clear of the average.

On the debit side, though, Mr Shah has underperformed the average rival over most periods since taking up his latest fund, Fidelity European Aggressive, in August 2005. Meanwhile, Mr Korhonen has pretty much performed in line with the average since taking sole charge of Global Special Situations at the start of the year. So what’s the moral of this story?

The main one is that it is probably too early to reach a verdict about either man. Good fund managers take years to mature, including, as the record shows, the great Anthony Bolton.

Secondly, don’t rush to hasty decisions. No doubt advisers act from the best of motives, but it may be in their interests to get you to move to a new fund. They can pick up a handy initial charge of as much as 3 per cent if you move. As well as that cost, you may find, if you opt for a unit trust, that you take an immediate hit on the difference between the buying and selling price.

Thirdly, bear in mind that Anthony Bolton has chosen both these characters, albeit from a field limited by the confines of Fidelity’s home-grown talent. That is a big caveat, given the string of high-level departures the fund manager has suffered over the past year or so. But Mr Bolton should know a good manager when he sees one. Tim McCarron has been a worthy successor to him at Fidelity European, even if he underperformed last year.

So, on behalf of my children, I am going to stick with Messrs Korhonen and Shah with our holdings in Fidelity Special Situations, both UK and Global. But if they show signs of slippage I shall know where to turn. Citywire, the information group, has identified four other managers in the UK All Companies sector whose performance has, like Mr Bolton’s, been amongst the top 20 per cent over most of the past five years. For the record, they are: Giles Hargreave of Marlborough Special Situations, Nigel Thomas of AXA Framlington UK Select Opportunities, Mark Lyttleton of Merrill Lynch UK Dynamic and Thomas Dobell of M&G Recovery.

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