Blake Hutchins has joined Francis Brooke and Hugo Ure on the £240m Troy Income & Growth trust a year after joining Troy Asset Management.
Hutchins (pictured) joined the boutique manager in October 2019, immediately joining Brooke and Ure on the £3.5bn open-ended Trojan Income fund and replacing Mark Wharrier, who left Troy after an eight-month stint to join Majedie. A regulatory filing on Friday, said he would now be the third co-manager on the investment trust effective immediately.
Troy Income & Growth chairman David Warnock said: “Blake was a very astute hire by Troy and his high-quality stock picking and risk averse investment style is complementary to both Francis and Hugo.”
AJ Bell head of active portfolios Ryan Hughes said the addition of Hutchins as a third manager on the investment trust was unlikely to make much difference to performance. “But I think it probably signifies very sensible succession planning.” AJ Bell holds both Trojan Income and Troy Income & Growth in its portfolios.
In an interview with Portfolio Adviser last month, Hutchins said he had been accelerating the Troy Income fund’s rotation out of oil and gas names including BP and Shell and into quality names that the team believed had the ability to grow free cash flow. Croda and Intertek were among some of the new ideas he brought to the fund.
Trojan Income and Troy Income & Growth have very similar portfolios with the top-10 holdings being virtually all the same, except for the former holds British American Tobacco while the latter instead holds Procter & Gamble.
With 45 companies in total, Troy Income & Growth is slightly less concentrated compared to the 38 names in Trojan Income.
In the year to date, Trojan Income has fallen 16.4% while Troy Income & Growth has fallen 18%. The FTSE All Share has fallen 23% over the period.
Hughes said the one-year time lag between Hutchins joining Trojan Income and being added to the investment trust was likely down to the differences between open-ended and closed-ended funds.
“When you’re running a fund it’s very easy to add a manager. When you’re running a trust it’s the board that’s got the power to do that and it’s not something that they needed to rush to do.”
See also: Blake Hutchins uses Covid volatility to make his mark on Trojan Income
