Q:  What is the history of the company?

A : The company was set up in 1986 by Christopher Taylor Young. He was the chief executive of a bank and when he left that bank he set it up as a small family office for his family and friends. The company grew quite rapidly in the late ‘90’s and lost funds in the early 2000’s when the market turned down.

The team of which I was one, joined the company two to two and a half years ago, from a company called Gerrard, which is one of the bigger UK fund managers. Gerrard was bought by Barclays Bank at that time.

Our background is looking after clients’ money and investing clients’ money. We wanted the flexibility to do that as an independent fund manager, where you wouldn’t have a big brother and a parent looking over your shoulder, trying to push their products down into your clients’ portfolios. So, we built the business up.

Q:  What’s your investment philosophy?

A : We invest our clients’ money in a thematic basis. We believe that there are certain investment themes that are very strong in the market and that will drive performance over the medium to long term.

We do not hug industry or benchmarks at all. We believe that over the long period we can outperform by identifying and capturing the various market themes, which if we are correct and stick to our beliefs, we’ll be able to outperform our competition over the medium to long-term.

Q:  Can you give some examples of these themes?

A : For example, we had beliefs that China was going to merge in the global theme of power and it would suddenly need more resources. That led us to look at resource stocks such as oil companies, particularly mineral companies, where we started to build ratings back in 2003 and had a very successful raft over the next three years.

We also believe that markets are often imperfect at looking at the break-up values of particular stocks. There is often hidden value within companies which can manifest itself when companies demerge themselves into various component parts.

We are strictly thematic investors. We invest in these themes and we are concerned about just matching up our holdings with various weightings in any kind of index. We are not closet index trackers or anything like that.

Q:  Does that mean that when the investors are buying into your fund, they don’t really compare your returns to any specific benchmark at all?

A : On the income fund there is a benchmark, which is 80% the FTSE All Share index, 15% the gilt index, the fixed interest index and 5% cash. This is the kind of benchmark we use to see how we are doing. But you have to expect some volatility around that kind of benchmark.

As a top-down analysis approach, I favor investing in equities rather than bonds. There is an overweight position in equities and a considerably underweight position in bonds. In a macro level, that’s added value against the benchmark and within the equity portfolio there is added value due to our thematic investment approach.

Q:  How do you generally search for a theme and then how do you turn a theme into an investment holding?

A : We have an ongoing thematic forum, where all the fund managers get together to evaluate what our current themes are and whether they are still relevant and bring to the forum any ideas they seen through research.

One particular good source of themes comes from the fact that our private clients often tend to be senior directors in public companies themselves, and talking to them, we get a very good idea about how their industries work. We bring to the forum a wealth of potential ideas from a wide variety of sources.

One theme that we have been looking at for the last year has been the area of luxury goods on a global basis. Our feeling is that these companies will continue to produce quality earnings and growth going forward, almost regardless of what goes on in the economic cycle so we focus on building portfolios in companies like, LVMH, Cartier, Richemont and Tiffany that exhibit a strong luxury franchise.

The ideas are reexamined every quarter to find out whether the existing ones are robust and whether we bring new ones to the table through the gathering of the investment managers.

Q:  How many themes are you invested in at any given time?