14/10/07

Face to Face with the country's leading Fund Managers

We recently attended Citywire's Cabinet event in London, which is an intimate face to face discussion with the country's leading fund managers. Each event is attended by over 50 leading intermediaries and portfolio managers with a selection of leading fund managers presenting. This time around there was also a leading economics adviser invited to speak about the recent market volatility.

The event is very well run with the speakers allowed 15 minutes to present their subject and the following 15 minutes taken up by questions from the floor. The interaction between the host, the speaker and the floor is very open and it is often during the question and answer session that you find out a lot more about what you want to hear as the fund managers are put on the spot!

For the first time, interactive voting technology was used to assess the views of the floor and allowed the speakers to see the collective view of the floor in one.

The themes of the Cabinet this time around covered the UK, Europe, Green investing and an overall economic summary.

The overall feeling from the attendees about the state of the markets was very positive. Whilst there may be some short term fluctuations the majority of people expect to see equities outperform cash over the next 12 months - something that we believe will be true.

The Green session was perhaps the most interesting and challenging with Argyle's Jean MacIntyre putting Charlie Thomas from Jupiter's Ecology Fund on the spot with the first question. What Jean was trying to highlight was if you are investing ethically (not just with Jupiter) that is why you are investing in a certain fund. You do not want to read in the literature that the fund manager is able to invest in a certain company that makes a small amount of its turnover from tobacco or armaments do you? It is either green or it isn't. Charlie talked through several examples of companies that could fall into this position and confirmed that he wouldn't invest in them.

In addition Charlie also made clear that he saw the fund as an equity fund that invested in carefully selected green companies from around the world in order to deliver the growth he was looking for and was happy to compare his track record against other global funds - rather than other green funds.