Nigel Legge, co-founder of Liontrust who quit as its chief executive in May last year, is now at the head of Vinculum, a business he first announced earlier this year aiming to bring a new process to fund management that would strip out human error.
To this end he has joined forces with Bjarne Jensen, chief executive of StockRate Asset Management whose proprietary investment process Vinculum will use exclusively. In a statement, Legge said: “This process aims to deliver long-term capital appreciation by identifying and investing in companies of the highest economic quality. The process is empirically derived and is not influenced by valuation or forecasting and looks to minimise human error in the stock selection process.”
The StockRate process – available only to Danish professional investors and private clients since 2000 – identifies, rates and selects only companies of such economic quality based on their ability to demonstrate superior combined financial and earnings strength over time.
Vinculum will build and actively manage long-only equity propositions, the first one being the IM Vinculum Global Equity Fund which will launch on 3 January, 2012. It will be benchmarked against the MSCI World TR and will include 50 globally-listed stocks. A spokesman for Vinculum confirmed the inital launches will be UK on shore Oeics available to international investors.
There is no management fee and the firm will only be remunerated if it outperforms its benchmark. There will be a fixed charge of 0.25% of assets under management. Where the fund does outperform the MSCI World over a quarter, there will be a 20% performance fee on that outperformance.
Commenting on the launch of Vinculum, Legge said: “There are an awful lot of things about our industry that investors are beginning, justifiably in my opinion, to rail against – unfair pricing, inconsistency of intra-company process across products, underperformance due to human error, the overly hubristic trading culture and much more besides. With Vinculum we are looking to shake things up a bit, put these things right and offer investors real value for money.”
