Making the break
It has not been all smooth sailing for Pease in his career, however. He,like so many of his peers, was hit badly by the 2007-08 financial crisis. Events during this period largely forced Pease’s hand in terms of the direction of his career.“I joined Jupiter in 1990 when John Duffield, who had started the firm,gave me my break. I joined New Starin 2001, in large part out of loyalty to John. New Star was a great success,until we blew up,” Pease says.“We blew up because we had taken on debt at the wrong time, as well as some issues with the UK equities funds.“I didn’t really see the macro going as badly as it turned out, and we had parked money in some of the big banks. Unfortunately, with our fund generating around half the profit of New Star, when that reversed it hit hard,” he explains.“Henderson picked us up and I spent a nice six years there. They were by far the best people to do that.”Ultimately though, despite being relatively happy at Henderson, the chance to set up his own firm with what he saw as the ideal collaborators was too much to resist.
“The opportunity to set up Crux emerged through fortunate coincidence, whereby I could have what I feel is the dream team. It was more that the opportunity arose rather than dissatisfaction with being at Henderson. I have my colleague James Milne here, who scored the top results in the world when he did his accountancy exams, and he is very good at everything to do with risk.”Pease is also joined by long-time associates chairman Charles Ferguson and chief executive Alistair Reid, as well as who he sees as an “exceptional”analyst, Roland Grender. The move was in no way inspired by a desire to head up a business rather than manage a fund. “I have no ambitions to run anything other than money,” Pease says. Starting up a new business in any industry is not without significant risk but part of the appeal for Pease and co is that they have been able to do so with a huge head start.
“A nice aspect of forming Crux is that we have started with about £1bn, so it wasn’t a case of going all the way back down the snakes and ladders board. We were immediately credible with company managements, able to get good meetings and also credible with brokers.“I am not an entrepreneur by nature but I didn’t have to be; Crux is a startup that isn’t a start-up.”
