Jeremy Tigue, the City fund manager who has been running the Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust for the last 15 years, today offered the following advice for successful stock picking: don’t read the newspapers.
While the manager of the £2.3 billion fund was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, he sort of means it.
“If you screen out all of the macro news, you can see that underneath things are going fairly well,” he said. “Most businesses are ticking over. It’s not as bad out there as people are suggesting. Things are ok.”
He was talking as the fund revealed half year results that show net asset value up 5.1% to 339.37p. The interim divi will be 4p, a rise of 33%.
By investing in high quality companies all over the world, Tigue believes he can avoid much of the unknown on behalf of his 109,000 clients.
His strategy is unaltered despite the eurozone crisis. “We haven’t changed anything,” he said. “There is so much uncertainty. But it is the fear of the unknown rather than anything that has actually happened so far.”
The trust, around for 144 years, is the oldest in Britain.
Although Tigue is relatively upbeat, his chairman Simon Fraser warned in the statement to the stockmarket that “the recovery from the financial crisis is going to be pedestrian and prolonged”.
The trust’s share today opened flat at 305.9p.
