Co-manager of the £234m International Biotechnology Trust and former athlete Marek Poszepczynski (pictured) believes the Nordic principle of being humble is a key trait for an investor.
Before becoming a fund manager, Poszepczynski was a long distance runner after initially starting out as a handball player.
“There is an interesting phenomenon in the Nordics called ‘Janteloven’ – where people need to be humble about however they perform,” he says. “I ascribe to that, I think it’s important to be humble. Even when you’re good, there’s always someone better than you and you can learn from everyone. You need to be humble because a career can end very quickly, as it did for me.
“But I learned a lot during the process. You need to work hard for everything and you get nothing for free. And I think I’ve applied that to my professional life as well.”
Poszepczynski began his sporting career as a handball player in Sweden at junior level. However, he sustained a knee injury while on the cusp of turning professional which ended his playing career at age 23.
“At that time, there was not a lot of money involved in the industry, so I had to take the decision to say I can’t do this anymore and I reset my expectations. I started jogging just for rehab, but happened to be quite talented at running.
“I was running a competition and was approached by some clubs. I started to do more long distance running and qualified for the European Championships in marathon, which is a very big difference from being a bulky, heavy weight handball player towards becoming a marathon runner.
“It was interesting to see different attributes being put to work in playing in a team sport versus being in an individual sport at a top level. One of the lessons I learned is that there’s always someone that’s better than you.
“Through my career, a lot of things were serendipity, and a lot of grit and working hard.”
Recalling an encounter with double Olympic gold medal winner and running legend Haile Gebrselassie at the Berlin marathon in 2007, Poszepczynski believes it is important to learn from the best rather than comparing oneself to their performance.
“Running is very objective. Either you perform or you don’t. I had to qualify for the European Championships and I have one anecdote when I realised how good some people can be. I was sitting on a bus at the Berlin marathon, and I was sitting besides Haile Gebrselassie, the double Olympic gold medal winner.
“I found he was sitting beside me, and he was so tiny. But when he was running, he was so impressive. It was just so amazing how, despite me putting in so much effort, I was so far behind. And for me, it was a lesson learned to be appreciative of what you have, because the comparison with some people is just so brilliant.
“I think that’s a lesson. There will always be superstars and you need to be happy for what you have achieved and be happy about it, because otherwise everything would drive you mad.”
Biotech
At the same time as his sporting exploits, Poszepczynski was also pursuing his interests in the biotech space. With degrees in both business and chemistry, he found that investing was the perfect way to marry the two interests.
After spells at different biotech and venture capital firms, he joined Handelsbanken Capital Markets in 2010 as lead analyst covering pharma and biotech.
He joined SV Health Managers, the investment manager for the International Biotechnology Trust in 2014, initially as an analyst before becoming a named manager on the trust in 2017.
Founded in 1994, IBT offers investors exposure to the biotechnology sector through an actively managed, diversified portfolio. As well as investing in quoted biotech stocks, IBT includes a small proportion of unquoted investments.
Schroders was appointed as investment manager in 2023, with Poszepczynski continuing as manager alongside Ailsa Craig.
From an investment perspective, the biotech sector has struggled in the years following the Covid pandemic.
Reflecting on the last three years, Poszepczynski said: “It has been a tough time, and we have on a relative basis managed to do okay versus the index. When we joined, the first thing we did was say the market was overvalued, which is perhaps not very smart thing to say politically when you’re running a fund.”
“The biotech industry is relatively interest rate sensitive, considering it takes 10 years to develop a drug. The cost of money is very important for these companies. So when interest rates went up, the biotech sector went down. But we have seen interest rates, hopefully, peaking and historically, biotech has done well in cases of recession.
“During four of the last five recessions biotech has actually outperformed. One of the reasons is because going into a recession, interest rates go up before hitting a peak and biotech tends to underperform going into that cycle. But during recessions they tend to do well, so we have good hopes of recovery in the industry.
“Since October lows, we have seen the small-cap portion of the index move up quite a lot. The larger caps, of course, do not have the same leverage in terms of performance. But we have never seen such a long bear market in the biotech industry, in the three years we have from 2021-24.
“Now we have seen green shoots, we’ve seen IPOs, financing at the beginning of this year has been really good and much better than we have seen for several years.”
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