The irony that GAM’s office, Adrian Gosden’s new workplace and the location for our interview, is a couple of doors down from his previous employer has not escaped either of us.
St James’s Street is very familiar to Gosden who, prior to joining GAM, spent 13 years honing his craft on Artemis’s £10bn equity income franchise.
New office, new employer, new fund, but it’s business as usual for Gosden, whose GAM UK Equity Income Fund launched in October amid much media attention after his long stint at Artemis.
“This is very familiar to me,” he says. “I feel I have done this sort of journey before. I am about the same age now that Adrian Frost was at Artemis when we set that fund up 13 years ago, and I would have been about the same age then that Chris Morrison, who I’m working with, is now.”
Gosden describes his route into fund management as “very ordinary” but he has come a long way since.
Not long out of university, he joined a firm called Andersen Consulting. Here, he found himself in the “extraordinary” and “bizarre” situation of being a 22-year-old strategic consultant, sitting in boardrooms offering corporate advice to greying company executives.
Next was a stint at Fleming Investment Management as a buy-side analyst and fund manager before moving to Société Générale Asset Management as a UK equity manager in 1997 after Nicola Horlick set up the business. That was where his passion for equity income began.
A style with flourish
“The interesting thing is when you become a fund manager you don’t know the type of manager you are going to be,” he says. “It just so happened, I was fortunate enough to be shown the ways of income.”
Gosden says working at Soc Gen in the late ’90s early ’00s saw him running an income fund at the height of the tech boom when “everyone else was buying all sorts of imaginative companies and there we were, plugging away with ‘ordinary’ companies”.
In 2003, Gosden was recruited by Frost to help run the income fund at Artemis, where he spent a fruitful 13 years before it was revealed in the summer he was jumping ship for GAM.
Equity income is clearly something Gosden is passionate about and he believes there is a clear-cut case for the style to flourish given the UK’s savings mentality of preserving capital to pass on to future generations. But is it just a copy and paste job from Artemis to GAM or does Gosden have a trick up his sleeve for the new fund?
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