And work hard he has. The Bowie-led TwentyFour Corporate Bond fund, launched in January 2015, has gone from nothing to £340m in two years. In the year of its launch, it was one of only seven funds in the sector that produced a positive return.
Toward the end of 2015, he launched his second vehicle, the Absolute Return Credit fund, which Bowie says employs “a unique design to keep it low volatility”.
Post-Brexit, “demand for the fund has gone ballistic”, he says. At the time of this interview, the absolute return vehicle was worth £282m. By the time you read this article it may well have ratcheted up to £300m.
Since volatility and political uncertainty remain the status quo and bond yields are trending upward, the momentum of that fund has picked up significantly in recent weeks, he notes.
In the two weeks before Christmas alone, the fund recorded more than £150m in inflows. And Bowie says there was an additional pipeline of over £200m in January from committed flows.
“We were trying to find a core asset to have in the fund that would protect it from the worst years of fixed income,” he explains. “That’s why two-thirds of the fund has to be in short-dated investment-grade bonds at all times.”
It also does not hurt that last year the fund had a Sharpe Ratio of above three, meaning Bowie delivered three times the amount of return as the amount of volatility for that fund.
Bowie executes all of his trades himself, something which he argues “keeps you close to the market”, besides being an activity he still clearly gets a kick out of.
