Ready-Made Portfolios: Which ISAs performed the best?

One year is not enough to judge the success of an investment strategy that has been designed for long-term growth. However, these one year results may be useful if you want a snapshot of whether your returns have been above-average or below-average when compared to other similar funds.

The data on this page is past performance data. While this data enables you to see how portfolios have historically performed, past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Investment returns can rise and fall.

What is a ‘portfolio’?

The term portfolio means a collection of investments that a person owns.

What is a ‘ready-made portfolio’?

A ready-made portfolio is a mix of investments that has been selected by an expert to help get you started as an investor without needing to research thousands of different stocks, bonds and other options yourself. You can think of it like a ready-meal that just needs to be put into the oven, rather than a meal that needs to be prepared from scratch using raw ingredients.

The experts who design the portfolios will choose a range of investments that result in your money being spread across many different assets – that’s known as ‘diversification’. They’ll also keep an eye on it over time. The goal is to keep it on track so it meets certain performance outcomes.

Ready-made portfolios are designed to keep investing easy. But, just to confuse things, different providers use different names for their ready-made portfolios. You might see them called:

Model portfolio
Managed portfolio
Multi-asset portfolio
Portfolio solution
Starter portfolio
Core portfolio
Simple portfolio

As a beginner you might also be directed towards a ‘Quick Start Fund’ which is intended to do the same thing – provide an easy, hands-off, one-click route to a diversified portfolio.

Only portfolios designed and marketed as ‘ready-made portfolios’, ‘globally diversified portfolios’, ‘Core’ portfolios or ‘Quick Start Funds’, were included in our analysis. They needed to be diversified, designed by investment professionals, and be marketed towards beginners and those looking for quick and easy investment solutions to qualify.

How does a ready-made portfolio work?

With a ready-made portfolio, the investment company chooses what goes into the portfolio for you. All you then have to do is choose whichever portfolio seems most suitable for your particular goals and how comfortable you are with risk.

Who are ready-made portfolios suitable for?

Ready-made portfolios are popular with beginners and less experienced investors because:

• No expertise is required
• Investments are picked for you
• It’s a quick way to get invested
• You get instant, ready-made Diversification is an investment strategy that involves spreading your money across different assets to reduce risk. The idea is not to place all your eggs in one basket. The benefit of this approach is that when one losses are felt by one type of investment asset class, it is rare that other asset classes are equally impacted. diversification
• The whole thing is often managed for you

But anyone can invest using a ready-made portfolio. They make investing simple and create a ‘ready-diversified’ collection that saves on leg-work and research time.

What’s inside a ready-made portfolio?

A ready-made portfolio will contain a mix of different investments, which could be stocks, bonds, and funds (known as assets).

Decisions about asset allocation will be based on the balance of risk and return that the portfolio is supposed to offer investors.

For example:

A “conservative” or “cautious” portfolio might largely consist of bonds, because they are considered lower risk investments. A “balanced” portfolio is likely to be a mix of stocks and bonds, and an “adventurous” portfolio will probably include a large proportion of stocks as they give more potential growth but are more volatile and so come with a higher risk of potential dips as well as rises.

As you’ll see if you scroll over the funds in the charts above, most of the best performing funds are ones classed as ‘Adventurous’. That’s what you’d hope as an investor, because while the risks are higher with an ‘adventurous’ portfolio, the returns when this kind of strategy is executed successfully, should also be higher.

Most of the funds in the worst performing categories are ‘Conservative’ funds. Again, that’s what we’d typically expect given that these funds are designed to avoid too much volatility. That can look like low and slow but steady growth.

There are some exceptions, however. Cases where certain funds and providers have performed exceptionally well.

And cases where funds have fallen far short of the competition: those providers have questions to answer.

Who did best?

The strongest 5-year returns came from equity-heavy (‘adventurous’) portfolios, which benefited from the strong stock-market recovery after the 2020 pandemic downturn.

All of the best-performing 5-year portfolios, and all-but-one of the top-performing 10 year portfolios were from the ‘Aventurous’ category, meaning they contained a high percentage of equities (stocks) rather than other asset types (such as bonds or cash funds). The exception was Moneybox, which did so well that not only their ‘Adventurous’ portfolio, but also their ‘Balanced’ portfolio made it into the top performers chart for 10-year growth.

When looking at growth over 10 years, Moneybox had the second highest performing of all the portfolios we looked at: Anything you had invested in this fund 10 years ago would have grown by a very impressive 221%. That’s another star for Moneybox. First place over 10 years was Vanguard’s LifeStrategy 100% Equity portfolio. This fund invests 100% of your money in stocks which can be risky, but on the flip side, can produce high returns when things go well. This fund would have grown your money by 225% over the past 10 years.

Another provider that has done very well, particularly over the past 5 years, is AJ Bell. (We don’t yet have 10 years’ worth of data for AJ Bell’s ready-made portfolios as they were only introduced in December 2018.) The professionals at AJ Bell have succeeded in getting four of the nine ready-made portfolios they offer into the top 10 performers for performance over the past year to 28 February 2026. While one years’ worth of data is certainly not enough on which to base a decision about a long-term investment (and past performance is not a guarantee of future performance either), it can give an indication of how well a fund is being managed in the context of the current market.

Over the past five years, AJ Bell has also done exceptionally well, with two of its easy investing portfolios making it into our top 10. Both its Passive Adventurous portfolio, and Passive Global Growth portfolio have done exceptionally well, producing 74% and 71% growth, respectively. The top performer was Vanguard’s LifeStrategy 100% Equity portfolio, growing investors’ portfolios by 82% over the past 5 years.

That gives Vanguard the top performing fund (LifeStrategy 100% Equity) over 5 and 10 years. Why? This fund invests entirely in equities (shares) rather than bonds or cash. Over the past decade, global stock markets have risen strongly, whereas bonds delivered much weaker returns, especially after interest rates rose in 2022–2023. Therefore, it benefited from holding such a high proportion of stocks, and from clever choices by the Vanguard fund managers.

Not all Vanguard’s popular LifeStrategy funds did quite as well, however: The LifeStrategy 20% Equity fund was the 4th worst performing fund we analysed over 5 years, gaining just under 8% in total. In contrast, AJ Bell’s Passive Cautious portfolio gained almost 20%, and AJ Bell’s Moderately Cautious portfolio gained almost 32% – a huge difference.

Someone putting £5000 into Vanguard’s LifeStrategy 20% fund would have gained £390.50 in gains after 5 years, whereas someone putting the same amount into AJ Bell’s Passive Cautious portfolio, would have seen their portfolio value increase by £997.50. (Neither of these calculations include deductions for provider fees, but for small portfolio-holders, Vanguard can be more expensive than AJ Bell in many circumstances.)

All this proves that not all funds are equal. Even when we take account of risk-return exposure levels, there are big differences in how much money a fund can return to you.

In investing, a benchmark is a standard point of comparison used to measure how well an investment or portfolio is performing.

It’s the reference yardstick you compare your returns against.

A benchmark helps answer questions like:

• Is this fund performing as well as it should be?
• Is the return worth the risk taken?
• Is active management adding value?

The FTSE 100 is a stock market index that tracks the performance of the 100 largest companies (by market value) listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Using the FTSE 100 as a benchmark is not always useful, as not all funds set out with the objective of outperforming the FTSE 100. However, there are times when it is useful to make comparisons.

If you are invested in an adventurous fund, for example, you’d expect shares to make up the biggest proportion of assets within your fund’s ‘basket’. Measuring your fund’s performance against the performance of a share index such as the FTSE 100 can therefore be an interesting comparison because it shows what you could have received if you’d instead put your money into a simple fund that tracks the performance of an index.

We have excluded ‘Conservative’ funds from this comparison because their purpose is risk control. Comparing them to an equity market would, therefore, not be a fair or meaningful assessment of their performance.

Who outperformed the FTSE 100?

From 28 February 2016 to 28 February 2026, the FTSE 100 grew by 161.46% in total cumulative returns.

Over the same period, the overwhelming majority of ‘Adventurous’ and ‘Balanced’ funds failed to keep pace. The only ones of those we analysed that outperformed the FTSE 100 were:

Vanguard (LifeStrategy 100% Equity Acc.) (224.98%)
Moneybox (Adventurous) (221.15%)
Fidelity (Allocator World Acc.) (215.41%)
Fidelity (Open World Acc.) (196.27%)
Barclays (Adventurous – Global Markets 5 Acc.) (180.43%)
HSBC (Global Strategy Dynamic Acc.) (179.59%)
Moneyfarm (7) (201.70%)
Moneybox (Balanced) (186.31%)
J.P. Morgan Personal Investing (Fully Managed Risk Level 10) (164.60%)
Vanguard (LifeStrategy 80% Equity Acc.) (163.10%) (this fund is also available through interactive investor, Fidelity and other platforms)

That leaves 34 of the 44 ‘Adventurous’ and ‘Balanced’ portfolios with at least 10 years’ data that we measured, underperforming the FTSE 100.

That’s 77%.

Even if you only compare the performance of the ‘Adventurous’ funds (although Moneybox managed to get both its ‘Balanced’ and ‘Adventurous’ funds to outperform the FTSE 100), the percentage that failed to meet the FTSE 100 benchmark is 58% (15 out of 26).