Good morning, everybody. Hopefully you can hear us and see us. Otherwise, this will be a bit of a lonely thing. Thank you for joining us today. For those who don't know, I'm Luke Ellis, the CEO, and this is Mark Jones, our CFO. Glad to see so many of you on the call today. Hopefully you and your families have remained safe and well during this pretty difficult time. Hopefully this is the last time we have to do this virtually, thanks to the vaccine rollout. Again, let's see where we are in the summer. As this is our second results conference call using Webex, can I remind everyone that if you'd like to ask a question, you'll need to access this presentation via the Webex link found on page three of the Results Press Release, rather than the dial-in option.
If you enter your questions in the Q&A section or put your hand up, and I will call on you, and we will unmute you to ask your question. You'll get to ask the question if the technology works verbally, but we have to unmute you one at a time. As usual, I'll start with some highlights and an overview of last year. Mark will take you through the numbers, then I'm going to discuss some of what we've achieved and the strengths we see in the business today. After that, we'll open to questions. Right. All that out of the way, let's get down to business. A few events in the last 75 years have had as profound an impact on our society and on markets as the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back at 2020, I'm really proud of how we've responded at Man Group.
Despite the market volatility, the public health emergency, and more than 99% of the firm working remotely for almost all the year, our team has not missed a beat, continuing to deliver for our clients and our shareholders throughout. Above and beyond their professionalism and commitment, I am really proud of how the whole firm has come together to support and look after each other and our clients in these difficult testing times. We have seen a year with significant, and at times unprecedented volatility in financial markets. In March, markets had one of their steepest and fastest falls on record, followed in April by the reverse of the steepest of rallies.
Crucially, we were able to respond at the speed circumstances required and to demonstrate the benefits of our proactive risk management and our super-efficient trading capabilities, and thereby rapidly adjust positioning to the changing markets, delivering for our clients in a time of crisis. The dramatic improvement in sentiment towards the end of the year, after the first of the vaccines was approved, particularly benefited our long-only strategies, but also very importantly, our momentum strategies as well. Against this background, we grew our funds under management to a new record of $123.6 billion. I'm going to try and drop the dollars all the way through, so if I don't say a number, it's in dollars. That's $5.9 billion more than at the start of the year. We saw net inflows of $1.8 billion for the year, with inflows in the second half coming in at an annualized 6%.
The AHL TargetRisk family of products continues to be an important contributor. We passed the $ 10 billion funds under management mark during the year and continues to have great traction with clients. Despite ending the year at record fund, because of the market events of March through June, the average fund for 2020 was less than the 2019 average, and this resulted in a reduction in management fee revenue in the year to $ 730 million. It's important to note we saw strong momentum into the year-end in both performance, which of course also compounds to increase our fund, and also inflows, resulting in run rate net management fees of $ 815 million at January 1st. While overall management fee profits in 2020 grew by 6%, supported by our cost discipline.
Performance fees were reasonable, helped by what feels somewhat like a regular December performance spurt, but down from a very strong year in 2019. We saw total earnings per share fall year-on-year as a result. As you know, our robust business model and its strong cash flow generation has allowed us to return about a quarter of a billion dollars to shareholders in 2020. A testament to our belief in Man's future growth trajectory is our decision to move to a progressive dividend policy, reflecting our confidence in the sustainability and cash flow generation in our business looking forward. I'll talk through that in more detail later. This year's full-year dividend has been set to $0.106 per share and marks the baseline for the new progressive policy, resulting in a final dividend of $0.057 per share.
Before we dive into more detail on our performance in 2020, I'd like to step back for a moment and reflect on the key fundamental strengths of Man Group compared to the wider industry. We have been, and always will be, a technology-driven investment manager. We are a global leader in applying technology to investment management, and we are essentially unique in the listed space. Our depth of knowledge and experience enables us to harness the power of technology across alpha generation, trading and execution, and our operating platform. Technology doesn't work in isolation. We're a people business. Our great people make our technology, and our technology makes our people more effective in everything they do.
That combination of talent and technology gives us a sustainable competitive advantage and allows us to deliver for our clients, which drives the growth of our business for shareholders. Turning back to 2020, our funds under management increased by $ 5.9 billion to a record high of $ 123.6 billion, due to positive absolute performance of $ 3.3 billion across both alternative and long-only strategies and net inflows of $ 1.8 billion. We calculate that inflows about 4.6% better flows than peers with equivalent strategies, with particularly strong market share gains in quant alternatives. You will remember that we had small net outflows in the first half of the year, particularly in the second quarter, as certain clients saw cash in response to the impacts of the initial COVID-19 market panic.
In the second half, it was a return to business as usual for Man, and we saw good net inflows primarily from our alternative strategies, which annualized at about 6%. Let me now talk you through our flows in strategies in more detail. In alternative strategies, we had $ 4.3 billion of net inflows. The AHL TargetRisk family of funds was the largest contributor, followed by AHL Institutional Solutions in AHL and AHL Evolution, and a number of the GLG liquid hedge funds. We've talked about the fact that AHL Evolution has been closed to new money for some time to ensure we have enough liquidity to continue to actively manage the risks in this strategy. We were encouraged by having no meaningful liquidity issues in this portfolio during the March, April market dramas, despite significant changes in positioning.
After a thorough analysis, we decided we could take in an extra $1 billion to the strategy. We were able to fill that in a matter of literally a few weeks with an incredibly high-quality list of clients. These inflows into alternatives were partly offset by some outflows. There's always some strategies down as well as up, principally this year from GLG ELS, the alternative risk premia, and the EM Total Return strategies. Our long-only strategies saw net outflows of $2.5 billion, partly driven by recent underperformance across a few of our valuation-focused strategies, both systematic and discretionary, and most noticeably our Japanese value strategy. Net inflows from the GLG U.K. Undervalued Assets team, it was really in the U.K. income strategy, but it's the same team name, of $1 billion, partly helped to offset the long-only net outflows.
We've been seeing an increase in interest in value-focused strategies, as I think Andrew Formica mentioned yesterday, since November. In fact, as some of the analysts have noticed, even JCA has actually had net inflows in 2021. Overall, $ 1.8 billion of net inflows for the group is a solid outcome, and even more so given we think we definitely outperformed peers by 4.6% as the equivalently weighted peer group saw net outflows. Going forward, we are convinced that liquid alternatives will continue to be a significant part of the answer to the problem of low bond yields for many clients. Alternative managers with excellent risk management skills who can deliver historic bond-like returns and risk profiles will continue to grow, and we are extremely well-placed in that respect. Turning to performance, 2020 was a historic year.
Financial markets responded to the pandemic initially with alarm and rapid and sizable declines, but then rebounded with uncharacteristic speed as governments and central banks introduced unprecedented measures. There was a period of relatively steady markets offering security selection alpha opportunities as different companies' COVID-19 handling led to lots of stock and credit dispersion. In the last quarter, positive news about the efficacy and safety of vaccines began to help the world foresee a normalization of life and economies, and equity markets went up rapidly. Our alternative strategies were up 2% on an absolute basis, delivering $1.5 billion of alpha for our clients. The gains were driven by strong performance from AHL Alpha, which was up 7.9%, and AHL TargetRisk up 5.7%, as well as solid gains across the GLG hedge fund, with GLG Innovation at 17.4% and GLG Event at 11.7% being the standout performers.
Our alternative strategies also did well last year on a relative basis and outperformed by 1.4% overall. Having benefited from the rebound in equity markets in the latter part of the year, our long-only strategies were up 4.3% on average on an absolute basis, generating a further $1.8 billion of gains for our clients. The gains were delivered by various strategies, including the GLG Continental European Growth and Numeric Global Core, and were gained despite the weaker performance in the value- bias strategies, particularly JCA and the GLG Undervalued Assets. The environment for value investing in Japanese equities was particularly horrible in 2020. While Man Group's funds this time underperformed by 1% during 2020, I would point out two things.
Firstly, GLG Japan CoreAlpha represents more than 100% of the overall relative underperformance of 1%, despite being only around 3.4 billion of funds at the end of the year, which tells you how tough value was in Japan last year. Secondly, things look rather different in 2021. As of the end of February this year, JCA was now outperforming by 11% year-to-date. No, that's not a typo. It really is 11% outperforming year-to-date. Meanwhile, our alternatives strategies did well last year and outperformed, as I said, by 1.4% overall. It's also worth noting we have very little exposure to the frothy parts of the global equity market. We're not the type of investors to own names with their first profits or even earnings somewhere beyond the visible horizon. Our stock holdings are actually at multi-year lows.
With that, now let me pass you over to Mark to talk through the numbers.
Thank you, Luke, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with a bit more detail on funds under management and then walk you through the P&L. As Luke noted, the combination of net inflows and positive investment performance took our fund to $ 123.6 billion. We saw strong inflows into alternatives, in particular into TargetRisk within Total Return, the $ 3.7 billion that you can see there for Total Return in aggregate. We also saw inflows into our absolute return products with a strong Q4 performance in particular. It's worth noting and repeating that we saw meaningful market share gains during the year, with net inflows being 4.6% ahead of relevant industry categories. We think that reflects the quality of what we offer to our clients. Overall, we delivered $ 3.3 billion of investment gains across both alternative and long-only strategies. Both made gains during the year.
Alternatives had a strong performance into year-end, in particular from a number of our quant alternative strategies. Long-only performance improved with markets, and as a reminder, we have a diverse set of geographies that we invest in, with a number of strategies focused outside the U.S. As ever, don't just think about the S&P. Turning now to the P&L. 2020 illustrates the strength of our business. Despite the challenging environment, we saw growth in management fee profitability, solid performance fee earnings, and continued cash generation and returns to shareholders. Core net management fee revenues were $730 million for the year, down 3% due to lower average FUM and a small decline in average net management fee margins during the year. Performance fees were $179 million, largely generated by AHL and GLG strategies, and we made a gain of $20 million on our seed book.
We actually made gains in both the first and second half, which reflects both effective risk management, but also strong performance despite the volatile environment. We grew management fee profits by 6%, with effective cost controls more than offsetting the revenue drops as markets fell during the first half. Efficiency remains an important driver of profits over time, and we've built an efficient and effective operating platform. 2020 is the first year with zero legacy revenues after the final roll-off from our guaranteed products business, so core and adjusted measures are now equivalent. The decline in management fees during the year was entirely driven by the drop in long-only fees, driven by the market declines that everyone experienced. Alternatives actually grew steadily over the year.
Run rate net management fee revenue increased to $815 million at the end of 2020, again driven by alternatives with a strong year-end, giving us good momentum into 2021. The group's total revenue margin fell by two basis points during 2020, with the reduction continuing to be driven by mix effects. As we discussed at the interim results, the discretionary long-only margin declined, as Japan has shrunk and fixed income strategies have grown. Total return margins have continued to grow as AHL TargetRisk increases as a proportion of the assets. The run rate revenue margin has increased to 66 basis points as we come into 2021. That's driven in particular by the growth in absolute return and the inflows into AHL Institutional Solutions and AHL Evolution that Luke mentioned.
For those of you missing our old revenue margin chart, we've started publishing a separate data pack alongside the results this year, and you can find it and various other nuggets there. Hopefully, that will make everyone's modeling easier. Turning now to performance fees. Performance fees for the year were $199 million. These include $124 million from AHL and $54 million from GLG, and then the investment gains I mentioned of $20 million. We have strong performance fee optionality and diversity, with $49 billion of performance fee eligible FUM at year-end. You can also see there's a wide range of different strategies that make a meaningful contribution. We've seen over $1.1 billion in performance fees over the last five years, and they remain a very valuable source of profits and cash over time. Turning now to costs.
Fixed cash costs for the year were $ 291 million, 10% lower than 2019 and lower than our guidance of $ 330 million. The decline reflected three things. Firstly, us taking steps to control costs in response to the market declines. That was about $ 12 million of the drop. $12 million was COVID-related, particularly reduced travel and event spend, and then FX helped by around $9 million, in particular, the sterling-dollar exchange rate being low. Those cost declines were important in protecting overall profitability in 2020, and as ever, running the business efficiently remains a focus. In 2020, the compensation ratio was at the higher end of the range, reflecting the drop in performance fee revenue compared to 2019. As a reminder, the ratio is generally between 40% and 50%, depending largely on the overall level of revenues and particularly performance fees.
Asset servicing costs were $55 million, in line with 2019, which equates to around seven basis points of the relevant FUM. 2021 cost guidance for fixed cost is $335 million based on an FX rate of 1.4. That reflects a slightly under $20 million FX headwind, $6 million from the need to sublet space in our main London office that we mentioned at the interim results, and an assumed $5 million increase as some of those COVID-related costs start to rebound as the world starts to normalize. The remainder reflects technology investment into areas where we see strong growth potential going forward. Finally, I'll just touch on our balance sheet. Our balance sheet remains strong and liquid, with net financial assets of $716 million, and we continue to generate strong cash flows.
The strength of that balance sheet is comforting in times like 2020, it's really the cash generation of our business that enables us to navigate stress scenarios while continuing to invest. Last year, we were able to focus on looking after our staff and our clients in the depths of the crisis. Many other companies suspended or cut their dividends and buyback programs, you've seen us grow our dividend year on year, move to a progressive policy and commence a new buyback program in September. The fact that our business is actually stronger at the end of a year like 2020 than the beginning is a great testament to the strength and flexibility of the model. With that, I'll hand back to Luke.
Great. Thank you, Mark. I'd like to return to this slide to emphasize what's unique about Man. If you look across the listed asset management firms around the world, I would challenge you to find anyone with our capabilities in our leadership position. We hire the best technologists, and we provide them with the environment to thrive. Our experience in quant investing is unparalleled, and we continue to emphasize investment in quant research and in technology to protect and grow our lead. When we look at quant and tech expertise, its experience, and resources, we think we have a huge competitive advantage as our industry, like all others, becomes ever more technology-driven. Technology is not just about making investment decisions. It powers everything we do at Man.
Over the years, we've invested in and built a single, robust tech platform that supports alpha generation, portfolio management, trade execution, operations, compliance, risk management, all the way through to fund accounting. Because of this, we can manage a huge range of strategies, instruments, and geographies with great speed and scale. That supports our growth in that we can add new strategies easily and at low cost. It's also about the quality of our control environment, as we can manage calmly through periods of market stress because we can see in one place all the information we need to make decisions, and we can comfortably deal with spikes in volumes as funds rapidly adjust their risk. I wanted to give you a flavor of how we use technology to address investment problems that humans alone can't handle efficiently.
You have an illustration here of one company and the web of clients, competitors, and suppliers it interacts with and therefore affect its prospects. The size of the dot represents the size of the company, and the distance from the center represents how far away the relationship is. Every day, information becomes available across that network that is relevant to an investment in that company. In today's interconnected global world, that information is released at different times in different languages, and there is a huge amount of it. Even if you had 100 analysts, they couldn't practically process the volume and breadth of information manually in a reasonable timeframe. Technology solutions are brilliant for these sorts of problems. Suddenly, you can deal easily with both the huge volume of information and the rapid reaction speed required to extract output from the new information.
It doesn't matter whether it's the middle of the night or if five other companies in the sector release reports simultaneously. You can process information in multiple different languages, and yet even emojis, as easily as you can in one language. When you have access to these sorts of sophisticated tools, you can discover new public information in financial markets and act on it. If you don't have the technology, then you'll see price moves, but without understanding their underlying cause until it's too late to benefit. The tech solutions we have at Man aren't just feeding quant models. We also equip our discretionary managers with technology to help them make better decisions. It's giving them information they can't process manually, but they can access with technology, or it's saving them hours of manual information compilation.
For instance, all our discretionary PMs now get a daily report with all the names being talked about on the infamous WallStreetBets Reddit page, with sentiment readings for what the forum users are posting. The technology lets the discretionary PMs focus on using their skills where humans excel while delegating more and more of the drudgery of information collation to the machines. It's hard on a slide to give you a feel of how ingrained technology is in our culture, but it sits at the center of everything we do. The depth of our experience and magnitude of our know-how is exceptional. We're orders of magnitude ahead of most asset managers, and we're focused on competing with the three or four top players globally. The investment we've made and the culture we've built gives us a huge and persistent competitive advantage.
The world's focus on sustainability and companies acting responsibly has been increasing for many years and obviously took a notable uplift as a result of the pandemic. As an asset manager, the sustainability of a company and its business model is critical to us. We have an integrated approach to ESG with a particular data focus. Our framework encompasses all of our investment strategies and allows clients to choose the level of ESG integration in their particular investment solution. We've taken our technology expertise, our data science, and our investment know-how and have built proprietary ESG tools that are used every day by our PMs. We've started to disclose new data points that we will update on a regular basis. Based on the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance definitions, Man Group has more than $ 43 billion of ESG integrated funds.
In the same way we focus on managing our clients' capital responsibly, we want to manage the firm responsibly. Culture is critical to any organization. We put a lot of time and energy into making sure that we're an organization where people feel that they belong and can be proud to work, and an organization that truly reflects our values. While culture is intangible and hard to measure, you build it with tangible steps and actions, and the impact of a good, strong culture is very meaningful for all stakeholders. You can see here a range of our tangible steps and commitments. We're committed to reducing our absolute carbon footprint and making consistent, transparent progress on this.
From 2020, we have offset any remaining emissions by supporting certified offset projects, and we're pleased to report that we're on track to meet our emissions reduction targets set for 2022 and have committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions in our global workplaces by 2030. Our charitable funding efforts are primarily focused on promoting education, although a number were directed into food banks and so on in this year, and are mostly run through the Man Charitable Trust in the U.K. and the U.S. equivalent. Our people volunteer significant time to help the charities we donate to and beyond. We've also this year invested $10 million this time into our U.K. community housing strategy, which is designed to accelerate housing provision that's particularly needed for many of the key workers that support the communities in which we all live.
In addition to our focus on delivering outperformance for our clients, we've positioned for continued compounding growth over multiple years. We develop innovative investment strategies by hiring exceptional talent, creating the collaborative environment, and leveraging our 30+ years of experience in liquid alternatives and systematic investing. AHL TargetRisk is the strategy behind a number of funds through which we've been able to capitalize on our technological lead. As you've heard, it's a sustainable contributor to our current results, but also our future growth. In 2014, TargetRisk was just an idea to develop a new long-only multi-asset strategy that would provide diversified exposure to a range of markets and adapt rapidly to changing market conditions using the same techniques that our hedge funds utilize. The research was developed. We provided the seed capital.
We waited while performance was generated, and in 2020, after only six years, it was the single largest contributor to net inflows, and it surpassed the $10 billion funds under management milestone in late 2020. Hiring exceptional talent to broaden our capabilities is another growth driver. On the discretionary side, two years ago, we hired Mike Scott to build a team and develop a range of GLG high-yield funds. Since then, the funds have generated impressive market-leading returns. In fact, I think the firm literally ranks number one on Lipper over that period. We've raised $1 billion, which feels just like the start. In the last quarter of 2020, we launched our GLG Asia ex Japan equity strategies, which are managed by an experienced team who joined Man last year.
In our alternatives offering, we broadened across both equity and credit strategies during the year with a number of launches that we think could each manage more than $1 billion in the future if things go to plan, as well as our multi-strategy offering, Man 1783, which of course can be much larger. Our disciplined capital allocation policy drives growth through earnings-enhancing M&A when and if we can find relevant opportunities with reasonable pricing or via share buybacks. Both options accelerate our core earnings per share growth. Since I became CEO, we've made it a big priority for the firm to adopt an outward-looking mindset, to listen and respond to our clients. They want a diversified range of products and new innovative solutions to help them meet their goals in the changing world. The breadth and quality of what we do is compelling for clients.
It allows us to be broadly relevant to a wide range of clients across the world, and importantly, to remain relevant throughout the market cycle. What you see from these charts is recognition from some of the world's largest and most sophisticated investors that we've built the products they need and want. Since the end of 2015, we've seen $26 billion of net inflows from clients, and the number of clients for whom we manage more than $1 billion has grown from 12 to 22. When clients invest in one product with us, they often make a second, third, fourth investment, and you can see here about $ 88 billion of our assets come from clients invested in more than one strategy. When you deliver for your clients, they reward you and the new business that drives growth for shareholders.
Man Group's business has been through a transformation, and at times in the past, the runoff of our legacy structured products business has meant that we've appeared to be running at double time just to stand still. That transformation is now complete, and we've reached an exciting inflection point. This is the first year with no guaranteed product revenue to shrink away anymore, and the growth in our core business feeds fully into our overall profitability. Our focus on building client relationships and delivering innovative products really works. Compared to five years ago, our core net management fee run rate has grown 23% to $ 815 million. We've grown core management fee earnings per share by 98%. We've also grown our performance fee optionality. I've said it before, I'll say it again, I'll keep reminding you until it gets boring. Performance fees are a very valuable earning stream for shareholders.
We've earned $1.1 billion in performance fees over the past five years. They are a very valuable part of our cash flows over time. If the market prices those earnings cheaply, and we've shown we've been very happy to use these performance fees to buy our own shares and drive earnings per share growth that way. Which brings me neatly to the next one. For an investor, this chart clearly illustrates the strength of our business. There's a natural bias in market to focus unduly on the recent performance. As you can see, the longer-term strength is self-evident and impressive. Over the last five years, we've returned over $1.4 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. That's about 50% of our market cap as we stand here today.
Our cash flows may vary year by year, but over time, they support strong and steady returns to shareholders, and they've just proven resilient to even the extreme stresses of a global pandemic. We didn't miss a beat during this pandemic. Our cash flows remained strong. We grew our dividends, and we completed one buyback, and we started another one. This morning, we announced a change to our dividend policy while maintaining our disciplined approach to overall capital allocation. Our new progressive dividend policy reflects our confidence in our strategy and our future growth and the resilience of our business model. We recognize the importance of dividends to shareholders, and we're confident that this revised policy will deliver sustainable dividend growth over the years ahead. Our overall capital allocation policy beyond dividends remains unchanged. We expect to generate material excess capital above the dividend.
Any excess capital will be used to augment growth, either via selective acquisitions should we find sensibly priced opportunities or return to shareholders via share buybacks or special dividends as appropriate. The numbers on this page show what we can deliver. Over the past five years, as we said, we generated $1.1 billion in performance fees. We've outperformed our peers by 3.2%. For our alternative strategies, our performance is about 2% per annum versus peers. We've seen increasing confidence from clients who've invested an additional $26 billion, taking our funds to its record $123.6. We've returned more than $1.4 billion to our shareholders. The business has performed well. I'm really excited about what we can do from here. 2020 was dominated by the impact of COVID-19, the upending of our normal way of life, and the public health emergency the world has been facing.
2020 saw exceptional work from the healthcare sector, creating vaccines in record time. It also showed the best side of humanity as communities and neighbors looked out for one another. I can't express how proud I am of everyone at Man. They've worked together in these difficult and challenging times and looked after each other. We're an agile, resilient firm, and despite the backdrop of 2020, we've delivered. Record funds, net inflows, an increase in management fee earnings, and a new progressive dividend policy while continuing to invest in our technology and talent. The hard work we've done over the last five years on our business model is the foundation that makes all this possible and also the platform for further growth. It looks as if the economic uncertainty created as we, well, hopefully exit the pandemic, will lead to more intra and inter-market volatility in 2021.
We might even see higher sustained bond yields. We would look forward to this as it would give lots of opportunity to add alpha and for sophisticated risk management to add further value. From a business point of view, 2021 has got off to an encouraging start. We've continued with the good momentum from the fourth quarter. Client engagement is positive. Performance has got off to a strong start. We have an exciting pipeline of innovative new products. As you can hear, I'm proud of what we've delivered, and I'm also really excited about what we can do from here. With that, we'll open it up to questions. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'd have needed to join the presentation via the Webex link in the joining instructions.
On your screen, you can then either put a Q&A, as I can see people have, or you can press the raise hand button to notify us, and I'll call on you one by one, and then hopefully somebody will unmute you, and we can hear your question. Thank you for the time, and let's go with the questions. Looking at this, Haley, I think, was first in. Haley, if you're there, Haley Tam, if someone can unmute you, and you can go with your question.
Perfect. Thank you, Luke. Hopefully you can hear me fine.
Perfect.
I have three questions, please. First one just on slide 25 and your progressive dividend policy. I wonder if you could just confirm to us that in the absence of M&A opportunities, your new policy is not expected to affect your ability to carry out the steady program of buybacks that we've got used to. That's the first question. Second question in terms of management fee margins. I think it's pretty unusual to see, for you or for any asset manager, a run rate fee margin actually above the one that's just been reported. I think it's the first time I can actually remember for you guys. I just wondered, obviously, that's due to a mix of absolute return growth and the mix shift within total return. If there are any comments you can make to us about your confidence in sustaining this sort of level from here?
Then the third and final question on slide 21, your current priorities. You listed out a few areas like more target risk funds, Man 1783, systematic, et cetera. I just wonder if you can give us any color in terms of the capacity for those and any visibility you have to client demand at the moment. Thank you.
Cool. Okay. Why don't I take the first one, you take the middle one? On the dividend policy, yes, you're right. As I mentioned, we expect to keep generating excess capital, we will either if we get a chance to buy an interesting business to integrate it, and it's at a sensible price, we would do that. Without that, we will return it to shareholders, either through buybacks or if the shares ever look above what we think of as fair value, I guess we might do a special dividend in that circumstance.
On the margin side, I think the more recent and positive trend on margin is the greater AHL TargetRisk within Total Return, which has been moving up the revenue margin within that part of our business, which we mentioned at the interims, but that's continued through the second half and expected to continue into 2021. Otherwise, it's really the same as we've always spoken about. It is mix-driven for us. It's what clients are choosing to buy. The fact that we were able to create capacity within AHL Evolution, which as Luke mentioned, sold extremely rapidly in Q4, has a very positive margin impact, but it's really about where the incremental demand is. The general trends haven't changed, particularly it's all about mix. There's some positive trends within Total Return, which is more recent, which helps out.
We still premise the business that clients will tend to buy some slightly cheaper products over time, and we therefore see net flows to drive revenue growth and drive profit growth.
On the new fund launches, we don't like to come up with specific capacity numbers on things when you launch them, in large part because otherwise then people assume if you don't hit capacity, there's something gone wrong, which isn't really how it works. We're very confident that we can keep rolling out strategies with innovation, interesting returns for clients, and enough capacity to keep our sales force busy, which I guess is what we really care about. Thank you, Hayley. Paul McGuinness. If somebody can unmute Paul and go next.
Okay. Good morning, guys. The question, I think you partially just answered it actually, Luke.
Sure.
The market seems unwilling within your rating to give you too much credit for performance fees. In terms of deciding on the mechanisms for returning excess capital, I think you just referenced the fact that it would partly depend on where the share price looked as to whether a special or a buyback was the most appropriate mechanism. Just within your own assessment of fair value, I just wonder how you guys actually build performance fees into that assessment.
Sure. We both have our methodology. Mark has a very impressive Monte Carlo model that estimates it, and I use a slightly more rudimentary rule of thumb. Look, performance fees are more volatile on any short-run period than management fees. That's correct. There's a mathematical equivalent to the different volatility, which requires a small discount if you look at that. If, on the other hand, you're looking over a five-year window or longer, which is I think what most investors say they're looking at, the reality is on a five-year view, that the relative volatility actually dissipates really quite quickly. In any week, in every month, we can't predict what the performance fees are. Over five years, as we've demonstrated, they are very reliable.
Yeah, look, the other thing, which is a statement of the blindingly obvious, a management fee profit and a performance fee profit both turn into the same dollar of cash. In the end, cash flows drive businesses over time. If the market continually allows us to buy back the earnings stream cheaply and therefore add value to continuing shareholders, we will keep doing it. That is an extra source of value for people who see the same value that we see in the performance fee.
Cool. Thank you, Paul. Then David McCann. David, are you there? Okay, we'll come back to David. If somebody can unmute Gurjit, please. Gurjit Kambo from JPM.
Hi, good morning, Luke. Hi, good morning, Mark. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, in terms of a market like China, what's Man Group doing next? We've heard a couple of the other asset managers set up joint ventures recently. Just wondering on the Chinese Asian markets, what the strategy is around that.
Secondly, just on ESG. Maybe you have you launched any dedicated ESG funds? I know you're obviously doing overlays on your funds, but is there any dedicated ESG funds you're looking at? Finally on sort of M&A, what sort of areas are you looking for which perhaps organically it's perhaps more difficult to do? Yeah, any particular M&A areas that you're looking at? Thank you.
On China, I guess look, we have a very institutional business. Our model is built around that and about having, where we deal with retail, having distribution partners where we can rely on them to do all of the work around KYC, AML, and so on and so forth. That restricts some of the things that we think it's sensible to do in China, where you are giving over a lot of control into a market where people don't like to tell you where their money came from. If you're regulated in the U.K. or the U.S., and you take money from Chinese people without knowing where the money came from, you are somewhat looking for trouble. As you know, we've had an onshore CTA running for, gosh, six or seven years now. It's been very successful in terms of performance.
Actually, last year was up about 60% net, I think. Markets where you have a lot of retail participation generally tend to create good opportunities for our quant strategies. We are working hard to be able to distribute that content into the few large institutions you have in China, where we have some decent relationships or to distribute them to offshore clients. On ESG, yes, we have a number of ESG dedicated strategies. As I mentioned, we have $42 billion, I think it is, of things where ESG is integrated, and we're working very hard on developing some interesting climate-related stuff using our quant processes.
Then on M&A, you'll have heard us say this before, but let me set it out again. We're really focused on quality and fit with the firm. Things that don't overlap with capabilities we have today and things that are incremental value add for our clients. We don't go out sort of going, "We must have this particular capability." We're focused on quality without overlap and cultural fit with the firm. We talk to 100-plus businesses each year. That process goes on. It is a process, so to do it well, we think of it as something you have to be actively sourcing constantly to find good opportunities. There's no particular obsession with, "It must be this." There's a key component that we want to add to the firm.
It's about adding quality, diversification, and things that are, in the end, value-adding for our clients.
Cool. Can we get on to Giblat, please?
Hi. Good morning. Yes, I've got three questions, please. Could I ask about the costs? You're guiding to about a 15% increase year-on-year in fixed cost. I was wondering if you could bridge the moving parts. Specifically, are there any COVID savings you made in 2020 that you're assuming are coming back in 2021? My second question is on the fee dynamics, if I can come back to that. Specifically, in the AHL product suite, what are the margins at which institutional money's coming on at? I'm just trying to work out if at constant mix you're seeing any change. If you could give a bit of color as well on AHL TargetRisk management fees, that could be quite helpful.
Thirdly, in terms of the change in dividend policy, now that you're moving to progressive dividends, I'm wondering if usually companies seek to have a bit of a buffer on the balance sheet and a bit of a grow dividend slightly lower perhaps than core management fees to try and buffer that progressive dividend. Is that something you're envisaging? Thank you.
Sure.
Sounds like it's all for you.
Yeah. On the cost side, the bridge is basically the stuff that I ran through earlier. You've got a significant FX move at the current rate. That's about $20 million of the move, and that's the single biggest component. We're assuming about $5 million from COVID-related costs, so travel and events rebounding. Obviously, that's an assumption, and we would think that that would be second-half loaded as the world starts to open up. There's $6 million, which is specifically around costs related to the space that we sublet within this office, so our main office in London, which as we mentioned in the half. That cost impact is really second-half loaded as well.
The residual increase is the actual investment back into the business to support growth and taking the foot off and out of some of the cost focus measures that we had through 2020 to protect profitability. On the margin side, new money coming into AHL is actually coming in at pretty similar to the run rate blended amount. The mix effect you get tends to be, as I've mentioned before, some of the high fee back book rolling off, there's not much of a difference between front book margins and average margins today. There's just still some chunk of higher fee back book in there around AHL Diversified. As we've said before, there's no real trend there other than a gradual redemptions over time, we don't see any accelerations to it. There's no fixed dates or anything like that.
Total return, TargetRisk margin, that's about a 70-basis-point margin. That's why it's moving the mix up over time. As Luke mentioned, there's still continued demand from a very wide range of clients for that product and its broader family of products. Lastly, on the dividend. Buffer is not a word we would have in mind. We have both management fee earnings and performance fee earnings, both of which generate cash, both of which support the dividend. We don't subscribe to the view that the management fees are the sort of only reliable bit of the earnings. The performance trip fees are there reliably over time, certainly over a five-year view, but even in the weaker years, performance fee profits have been there. We've obviously got a very strong balance sheet behind that.
Don't think about the dividend changes being, as I think the implication of the question is, that you're going to receive less dividends over time, but in a different form. We're expecting to pay out basically the same amount of dividends. Over time it has been about 60% of total earnings over the past five years, for some sort of reference there. The form is different, the reliability is different, and that is designed to appeal more to shareholders and to reflect, A, the resilience of the business. We've just gone through a global pandemic with the business in remarkably good shape and actually stronger coming out of the year than going in. B, the ability to grow that over time, which again, you've seen various of the growth information in Luke's presentation earlier.
Cool. Thank you, Mark. Can we try David McCann again, please?
Yeah. Morning all. I did had a question hopefully on the screen, but I'll read it out.
Yes. We're giving you the chance of your moment of glory.
Fair enough. Okay, just on the new dividend policy, actually, Mark, quite an opposite then, actually. I just wondered if there was any kind of target payout ratio. You actually did mention kind of 60% broadly speaking, just maybe any color there. You obviously mentioned it's progressive, is there any targeted minimum growth rate within that? It's just the first question. The second question on the side, there's a number of interesting comments around the benefit of technology and your leadership position there. Obviously it didn't really seem to help the asset-weighted relative performance, at least last year.
I guess on a diversified basis across the group, so I guess when could we expect to see more tangible benefits of that coming through?
I'll take one if you want me to first.
Yeah, sure. I say 60%, just for reference, it's not a target payout ratio, it's a classic progressive dividend. As we sort of set out in the policy, we're looking to grow it over time as the underlying earnings of the business grow. We'll clearly set it and announce it to the market in the normal way year by year. It's designed to grow with that underlying earnings capacity. It's not specifically attached to either the management fee or performance fee side. It's the total earnings which support it, and the total earnings which will grow it over time.
In terms of the performance question. As I mentioned, more than 100% of the underperformance last year came from GLG Japan CoreAlpha. It was a shocking year for value in Japan. Poor old Stephen Harker, who's run that product incredibly effectively for such a long time, and he's one of the great stalwarts of the industry. It finally reached a point where he decided it was time to retire. Maybe value had finally beaten him up so much at the end of the year, and since then, we're seeing a value recovery. That product is designed in a very specific way to meet client requirements. It's done very, very well over the long run. We're very sure it will do very well over the future. When value has a shocker, as it did last year, you get these very, very big underperformances.
When you get some sort of a bounce, as we've seen in the beginning of this year, you get some very big rebounds and the clients have been patient for that. It makes a big difference to the overall percentage. I think, when you look at the performance in things like AHL Alpha last year, which is clearly fully technology-driven and really delivered for clients and outperformed, and that is a sense of the technology working. It also goes all the way through. One of the things you have to remember in that period in March and April, there were so many opportunities to, frankly, to blow your leg off with the way markets were. We think that being able to understand your risk is a great thing, but being able to manage it requires you to be able to change positions very quickly.
We did over 4 million trades in March in order to change our positioning very significantly. That was with, if you remember, in whatever it was, the second week of March, we shunted everybody home. Suddenly you had a whole set of people who'd never worked from home having to manage 4 million trades. That we were able to do that without a blink. Without any pickup in fail rates, without having to slow down our execution in any way, without having to change process at all. To me, that is a real testament of what technology could do, and you've seen a number of people who weren't able to react quickly enough, who had business-critical losses last year, and I'm pleased to say we didn't have that at all. We've come through, I think, in a good way. Hopefully that answered that. I'm looking.
I think I haven't got anybody else with their hand up who hasn't been asked a question. Oh, sorry, Michael. No, Michael has just put up. Michael Werner, who's in the list.
Yes
Werner, Michael. Oh, there you are, Michael. Hi.
Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Just a quick question, probably for Mark. With regards to the dividend, how should we think about the interim versus final ordinary dividend going forward? Is there going to be some type of skew? Any color there would be helpful. Thanks.
Sure. Again, we'll anticipate being reasonably standard, so there tends to be a split across the market where the interim's a bit less than half of the total. Again, for us, given that the profitability tends to be slightly second half weighted with the performance fee side, that fits with the cash flow. We're not giving specific guidance around the exact split, but I would think about it in those terms.
Cool. There was a question. I saw briefly a question from Bruce. Bruce Hamilton, if you're on, can somebody go to Bruce and I think he had a question, or I'll ask it for you. Okay. Doesn't sound like we can unmute Bruce, but Bruce said, "How optimistic on sales related to the Asia team are we? When do we expect this team strategy to start fundraising?" I would say it's a super high-quality team. We thought that in the interviewing process. They have a very strong reputation. I would say since the team's been here, we've only been impressed to the upside of what we expected, and I think clients' reactions have been very positive. How much will come this year against future years is always hard to see, but I would expect that we will start to see noticeable inflows this year.
With that, we've run a full hour. I think I've asked everybody to ask a question who put one in, and I'm worried that the meter might run out after an hour. I think we'll say thank you, everybody, for your time and attention. You know where we are if you have any more questions. Good luck out there. Thank you very much.