Take it from someone who is your age, been investing a long time, and worked in the fund business for many years (even some of your UCITs), dump all of your active managers! Being in the business I used to consider myself quite clever, and thought I had the ability to pick out good managers that would outpace their respective benchmarks. Some of them did, for a while, even by a lot. But the market always catches up to them and they will eventually start falling behind. One fund that I've owned for a long time crushed its benchmark for many years. But it's been underperforming now for three straight years, and recently lost 10% in a single day!
A couple points about your original post:
First, those graphs really aren't illuminating anything for you. They might show the total return of the fund over the period since your initial investment (is this an accumulation share class?), but those are emphatically not your returns. Your returns are cash flow weighted based on the 100 pounds you invest each month. Your first hundred pounds did experience this but the rest did not. Google "internal rate of return (IRR)" to try to get a handle on cash flow adjusted returns and to figure out how you've actually done in this fund.
Second, the words "Special Situations" in the fund's name make it sound suspiciously like a hedge fund, and looking at the blurb on Morningstar that is exactly what it is. It may make extensive use of derivatives and leverage and other complex instruments that could be very risky. If this is your only holding you absolutely must diversify now!
Third, yeah the fees are ridiculously high. This is partly just a fact of life for European investors. Fees on your funds are higher than this side of the pond, which is why many US managers (like Fidelity) love setting up subsidiaries in Europe. There are some cheap index funds available to you, including Ishares. As you know, fees eat away at your returns. This manager has to earn 1.69% each year just for you to get back to 0.
Lastly, despite all this, it looks like this particular manager has done very well for the past 8 years or so. Those charts should be net of fees so they do, in fact, show the actual return of a pound invested on the starting date. Consider yourself lucky that you've done this well, sell all shares of this fund, and move on. This is a high risk fund and it's not a matter of "if," but only when it all goes to hell.
Take your proceeds and allocate them to a variety of passive index-type funds. These can be ETFs as well. You should be allocating across a variety of markets, each of which will have it's own benchmark, so using only the FTSE 100 won't really show you much. Naturally a UK investor will have a UK bias, but your equity holdings should generally be something on the order of 80% developed markets (US, Europe, Japan) and not more than 20% emerging markets. You may even find a single fund that does all this for you. Something like the Vanguard Total World Stock Index. Allocate some to bonds and real estate as well.
The great thing about index investing is how little effort it requires. There is no second-guessing your decisions, no need to monitor your managers to make sure they are not taking undue risks, no worry about whether you are underperforming. You're always doing as well as the average, no more and no less.
Good luck!
