Buxton has been promoted to CEO as part of a wider shake up which saw the departure of previous chief Julian Ide.
Speaking exclusively to Portfolio Adviser, he said: “Rest assured, I have thought about this long and hard and investment is my absolute number one priority and passion and my reputation and pride rests on it. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I could combine the two.”
He added: “I’ve always said that 65% of my time is investment, though that will go down to, say, 55% not 5%….. About 25% of my time is out and about seeing clients and marketing, and that will obviously shrink as I’ll get my colleagues Errol [Francis] and Ed [Meier] out more, and 10% is team management.”
Buxton expanded that managing his large-cap, low turnover portfolio is very different to a more “labour intensive” role that would come with running, say, the mid-cap, long/short, high turnover approach of Luke Kerr’s UK Dynamic Equity Fund.
The star manager was also keen to describe his new role as “more investment leadership than fully fledged CEO in the way that those three letters conjure up a full-time business responsibility”.
He added: “It’s strategic, it’s thought leadership on new investment products, and product rationalisation. I won’t be involved in nitty gritty operational issues, as we have good people doing all of that.”
Boxed into a corner
Addressing fund buyers’ suggestion that he it may have been more appropriate to promote him to chief investment officer rather than chief executive officer, Buxton said: “We have boxed ourselves into a corner here where we can’t use the CIO title because we have been very clear in recent years that we don’t want to have one, because from the moment you use that title people think it will lead to a centralising group house view, where everyone has to point in the same direction.
