Cobas AM: Nueva Gestora de Francisco García Paramés

Another question which arises from the Woodford incident is the question mark over so-called ‘star’ fund managers, a label the press seems obsessed by. I can’t say I like the term, it strikes me as equally inappropriate as the term ‘beauty parade’ which is used when selecting professional advisers, many of whom do not seem to me to have obvious photogenic qualities.

I think this concern is focused on the wrong issue. I think it makes no more sense to avoid funds run by ‘star’ fund managers any more than it does to avoid supporting sporting teams because they have star players. The trouble arises not because teams have star players but if the star tries to play a different game to the one which delivered their stellar performance. Would Juventus do as well if Cristiano Ronaldo played as goalkeeper? How is Usain Bolt’s second career as a soccer player going?

Neil Woodford made his name as a fund manager at Invesco Perpetual with his successful Income Fund. In the course of this he took two high profile negative positions on sectors. In the run up to the dotcom bust in 2000 he seems to have seen what was coming and avoided investments in technology, media and telecommunications stocks which was a major success. He also paired this with taking positions in some of the old economy neglected stocks which had become de-rated during the dotcom mania. Similarly, in the run up to the Credit Crisis he decided not to hold bank stocks.

However, when he opened his own fund management business he took positions in a wide range of companies — AA, AstraZeneca, Capita, Imperial Brands, Provident Financial and Stobart are some examples. There is no common theme that I can detect to those companies, other than the fact that they all subsequently fared badly. This was supplemented by a raft of unquoted investments in start-ups and biotech. My suggestion is that what went wrong is that Neil Woodford changed his investment strategy. In the technical jargon of the industry, he engaged in ‘style drift’. The problem wasn’t that he was regarded as a star but that he changed his game. This style drift actually started when he was still at Invesco Perpetual in that his Income Fund began to accumulate large stakes in small illiquid companies and unquoteds, but this was taken further once he had his own firm.