Can a fund manager really be this ridiculous?
Well, the year is nearly over and there have been some good quotes bandied around this year but a latecomer has appeared courtesy of an anonymous fund manager.
Now, we know that fund managers are always being ridiculed by the press. Commentators accuse them of having a herd mentality by following each other into certain shares for fear of being left out of the “next big thing”. Others accuse them of actually destroying the value of investors by their poor selection of shares and making things worse by creaming off a few percent of the funds every year for themselves, whether the fund has a good year or bad year.
Perhaps, we should lay off the attacks because on the basis of this contender for quote of the year, some of them appear to be able to ridicule themselves without our support.
During the last 12 months there have been very few companies coming to IPO and the main reason for this has been that fund managers have been nervous about valuations of companies coming to market and haven’t wanted to invest their surplus cash. So, no fund manager support, no IPO for the company. “Simples” as a meerkat would say. Well, not if you’re this particular fund manager, who said;
“There are serious questions to be asked, [such as] why a company which was so reliant on just two people was allowed to list in the first place.”
The answer to this “serious question” is because fund managers (like the contributor of this quote who is a large shareholder) supported it, despite the fact that the risk factors section in the IPO document specifically mentioned the reliance on two employees.
The irony of all this, as the price has fallen from 220p at IPO last December to 115p today, is that the company he is referring to is Gartmore, a well known errr…. fund manager. Ouch!
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