Andrew Formica has continued enhancing his stake in Jupiter by buying a further £500,000 worth of shares.
On Friday the Jupiter boss purchased 230,000 shares in the FTSE 250 fund house at 214p a piece for a total of £493k, according to a regulatory filing from Monday.
Shares in the FTSE 250 fund group hit 218p following the announcement but had dipped back down to 213p by the end of trading.
Following the transaction Formica owns around 850,000 shares or a 0.15% stake in the fund group worth £1.8m.
Former chief executive and current vice chairman Edward Bonham Carter is still the largest individual shareholder with a 2.26% stake in the business valued at £21.5m. Chairwoman Nichola Pease, who joined from Schroders’ board in March, and non-executive directors Jonathan Bond and Roger Yates each own 0.01% of outstanding shares in Jupiter.
Formica’s latest share purchase is his largest since he loaded up on £800,000 worth of Jupiter stock in March 2019 in a gesture of good faith the day he took the helm of the asset management business.
He and Bonham Carter also loaded up on £1.1m worth of high-coupon debt being used to fund Jupiter’s acquisition of Merian Global Investors.
Jupiter’s shares have been trading at depressed levels for years relative to other listed UK asset managers despite a shake-up of its senior management team under Formica and its £390m M&A deal with Merian.
At the start of the year the firm was trading at 409p a share, down 35% from its peak price of 631p in January 2018.
It was one of the worst hit fund groups during the Covid sell-off, losing around 50% of its value between 20 February and 23 March.
At the time Numis Securities flagged it as one of the asset managers facing “significant market headwinds” due to an uptick in outflows which it predicted would now persist until FY 2021 instead of flattening out by the second half of 2020.
In the first half of the year Jupiter suffered £2bn worth of redemptions which dragged AUM down to £32.9bn and saw profits halve to £40.8m.
This year Jupiter has introduced sweeping changes across its unit trust range after it found halve of its 40 funds sold to retail investors failed to deliver value.
