Greetham, who heads up Fidelity's multi-asset range, says that monetary stimulus and an improving outlook for the global economy have signalled the moment to begin allocating more heavily to equities despite prevailing uncertainties.
"A wide range of central bank easing moves are taking effect and a US-led recovery in global growth is under way," he commented. "Political risks remain high in the euro area but the crisis could go into remission again while the global growth backdrop is improving."
"We’re not surprised markets are pulling back after the initial melt up. Sentiment became excessively bullish. The ECB’s second three-year liquidity injection is behind us and some form of Greek default is imminent."
"I am concerned that the economic cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter and more reliant on support from policy makers. However, markets are more likely to peak out over the summer months than now given continued improvements in macro data and the pre-announced mid-year end date for the Fed’s Operation Twist. I am buying the dip."
According to data from FE Analytics, Greetham’s flagship Fidelity Multi Asset Strategic Portfolio has returned 27.94 per cent over the last five years compared with 10.16 per cent from the average fund in the Mixed Investment 20%-60% Shares sector.
Performance of fund vs sector over 5-yrs
Source: FE Analytics
Not all multi-asset managers are so optimistic, however. Tom Becket, who heads up the PSigma Dynamic Multi Asset fund, has taken profits from the defensive equities in his portfolio after a good run in 2011, and is using the money to buy in to the corporate bond market.
"At this point we are neither particularly optimistic nor negative on wider equity markets. On our analysis, broad market valuations are neither compellingly cheap nor wildly optimistic," he said.
"We have become concerned about the valuations of some of the defensive darlings of the last couple of years and we have started to reduce our focus on quality equities. This is not because we dislike the companies, their products or their ability to generate profits, but rather that their valuations have become too expensive and we see better opportunities elsewhere."
Becket has been positioned in cyclical and recovery equities for some time and, while he sees no reason to change this focus, he is seeing some extra value in company debt.
"The best risk/reward opportunities that we can still find in financial markets remain in corporate credit markets, where yields are attractive and there remains the potential for capital gains. We therefore recently increased our exposure to such assets," he explained.
"We believe that the strength of corporate balance sheets will be a powerful theme to drive investment returns in the years ahead. Admittedly we are arguably taking a higher risk of default than by investing in government bonds, but we feel that we are adequately compensated for taking this risk through the very attractive relative yields on offer."
With a return of 45.16 per cent over the last three years, our data shows that the PSigma Dynamic Multi Asset fund has slightly underperformed its Mixed Investment 40%-85% Shares sector. The average fund returned 52.97 per cent over the period.