Peter-Hoblyn joined from Mirabeaud and has slowly changed the UK Select Fund to include stocks he wants rather than simply manage the holdings he inherited from Brian Gallagher and Frank Manduca.
They took it over from Matthew Cox who ran the UK Select Fund between March 2006 and February last year since when Gallagher and Manduca ran it until Peter-Hoblyn’s appointment.
The UK Opportunities Fund will come into being on 10 June with £53m in assets under management across between 50 and 70 stocks. Peter-Hoblyn’s ideal is to get this down to between 45 and 55 best ideas with an average holding period of between one and two years.
He is a bottom-up stock-picker and has gradually shifted the weightings to a quality bias with a focus more on mega (44.6%), large (25.8%) and mid-cap (24.6%) stocks.
At the Portfolio Adviser UK Equity Expert Investor event earlier this month, Peter-Hoblyn explained he is a firm believer that fundamentally a business is its people, and this is critical to his investment process as he invests in entrepreneurial people.
“I will buy firms where I can see the twinkle in the manager’s eye,” he said, before concluding : “There are a number of stocks at attractive valuations not least due to investors confusing the UK economy with the UK market.”
