Jupiter extends the exit of star fund manager
Jupiter has said it has extended the departure of its star fund manager Ben Whitmore.
City investment house Jupiter has extended the exit of its star fund manager Ben Whitmore today after the announcement of his departure wiped millions from the company’s valuation in January.
Jupiter, which manages just over £52bn for clients, unsettled investors earlier this year when it revealed long-standing fund manager Whitmore would be leaving the firm this year to set up his own boutique investment firm.
Whitmore handled around a fifth of Jupiter’s assets and news of his exit sent shares down nearly 15 per cent in a single day in January.
The company said it would bring in Alex Savvides from rival JO Hambro Capital to replace him this year.
However, in a statement to the market this morning, Jupiter said Whitmore would now stay on some three months longer than expected to October, in order to “facilitate a seamless handover with his successors”. Sivvedes will now take over running the £1.6bn Jupiter UK Special Situations Fund on october 7th.
Jupiter said it has also poached two of Sivvedes current team, Stephanie Geary and Siddharth Sukumar, to work with him at Jupiter.
Whitmore’s new boutique may win some mandates from Jupiter to act as a “delegated investment manager” once it is set up, the company said.
The extended exit comes after Jupiter notched significant outflows in the first quarter after the loss of Whitmore and the separation of investment company Chrysalis.
The asset manager reported that its retail, wholesale and investment trust arm suffered a total of £800m of withdrawals in the first three months of the year.
This came entirely from the £820m Chrysalis investment trust leaving Jupiter’s control after the fund’s managers, Richard Watts and Nick Williamson, chose to leave the firm. The duo announced their decision to depart at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Jupiter’s institutional arm also lost £800m in investor money, almost entirely due to strategies managed by Jupiter’s value team. Institutional clients pulled £700m from those strategies.
This pulled institutional assets under management down from £10bn to £9.5bn due to mediocre market performance throughout the quarter.
In total, £1.1bn was pulled from strategies managed by the value team, pushing down the amount managed by the team from £8.5bn to £7.5bn in just three months.
Despite these outflows, Jupiter reported a slight uptick in assets under management (AUM) as robust market returns offset outflows. At the end of the quarter, AUM totalled £52.6bn, up from £52.2bn at the end of last year.
