These are some really interesting insights from a comprehensive article on Invesco Perpetual recently published by Fund Web:
Perpetual was the original boutique. It started its life with a few, then unknown, managers in the restful surroundings of Henley-on-Thames. This proved the unlikely setting for the germination of some of the best investment talent of its generation.
Today it is a behemoth, with £38bn under management, and its biggest challenge is to diversify away from the very fund managers that made it great.
That weight of assets is now the group’s greatest strength and its biggest problem.
The only consistent criticism of the group has been that there are a lot of assets concentrated in the hands of relatively few managers – namely £16.7bn across Neil Woodford’s High Income and Income funds and £8.3bn across the Corporate bond and Monthly Income funds managed by Paul Causer and Paul Read (source: FE at July 18).
Invesco Perpetual faces two major challenges:
- getting money into a wider range of their funds, and,
- planning for when their star managers do decide to step down
Problems that most other fund management companies would like to have.
The group has started to shift its product mix for the post-RDR world and still has one of the most stable and talented teams of fund managers in the market. Invesco Perpetual is not simply a three-trick pony.
Source: FundWeb. Read the full article here.
