For those familiar with the articles and pieces of written commentary that have flowed from Aubrey’s creative brains over the past years, you will be very familiar with the nautical or naval theme emanating from our joint Founders’ decision to name the firm after a hero of naval fiction. As the person privileged to command the crew of the good ship Aubrey, it has been my pleasure and thrilling challenge to do so during this past year of headwinds and unfavourable seas!
We ended 2021 on the crest of a performance wave given the previous two years of decent tailwinds, outstanding performance across our strategies, and respectable inflows from new clients. However, with our ever-astute team of investment managers watching from the crow’s nest (the real name of a meeting room in our office, if you must know), we were able to navigate past some giant icebergs throughout the year. The combined events of early 2022, Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine, rising inflation and China’s continued strict lockdown, all conspired to set the scene for an extremely challenging year and one that, in the shared opinions of our senior investment staff, compared with the shock of 2007-8. For growth investors, with a bias to consumer stocks, it has certainly been the perfect storm.
I will not dwell on the detail here (much has been written in other articles), but conviction in our investment philosophy, sticking to our knitting and not panicking, including some very sensible minor adjustments in weightings, has been our approach throughout the year. There have been some tense moments, but we seem to have weathered the worst of that storm, and, best of all, our clients have stuck with us, and we are delighted with this display of trust and faith in Aubrey.
2022 has been a year of development elsewhere in the business: Jon Gumpel joined us mid-pandemic and has spent the intervening months preparing the ground for his Defensive Income Strategy to launch. Happily, this happened in the summer, which was a very timely piece of good news for the firm, in the midst of the global gloom. With a £50m mandate, the Strategy was off with a bang, followed relatively soon after by a UK pooled Fund that has been a key focus for our marketing efforts as we seek to promote it and attract inflows.
Our marketing efforts have been another area of growth this year, with help from an unexpected quarter, namely, Love Island. European equity analyst Jay Younger was invited to join the TV show as a contestant. Welcoming this opportunity for Jay to spread his well-muscled wings, we attracted a surprising amount of support for this ‘sabbatical’ from clients and friends of the business. The resulting profile for Jay, via industry press, appearances at conferences and his podcast with Kim McAllister has been nothing other than positive for the profile of our firm. Building on this has been an interesting challenge for new team member Linzi Smith, who joined us in September and together with seasoned veteran Steven Rae, has been getting to grips with new product launches, a fresh approach to social media and some well-needed strategy analysis and planning.
Our Operations team have continued to keep the engine room buzzing, doing a remarkable job and getting to grips with fresh challenges month after month. 2022 was the year that our institutional performance numbers became GIPS compliant; a triumph of detailed analysis and black-belt spreadsheet wrangling, and a step up in reporting capability, particularly for our US clients. The launch of our new Defensive Income Strategy brought with it the requirement to reconfigure the trading system from equity-only to handling multi-asset securities, which has been a career-enhancing journey of discovery for the entire team! The final big piece in the operational jigsaw this year has been the transfer of custodian, administrator and management company for our biggest fund (AGEM). Involving thousands of hours of work, hundreds of ‘wet-ink’ signatures and a considerable dose of nerve-holding on the day of the transfer, this has been a significant achievement by our operational team that will ultimately deliver a better service and lower costs to our clients.
And so to business development. At the end of a year when global headwinds have made the job of attracting new inflows a significant challenge, Aubrey’s team of distribution and investment professionals that regularly interact with clients have done a superb job of informing, reassuring and accompanying our clients through these choppy seas. Clients of all types, be they Private Clients, Retail, Wholesale or Institutional, have been treated, we hope, with the utmost care and attention and as a result, we finish the year having retained almost every account, but also having attracted new flows into most of our products. There are very exciting prospects in all of our sales jurisdictions, as well as new territory including Germany and Spain. Having launched the Citadel (Defensive) Fund in September, we are very confident that it will be in great demand from many of our UK clients in 2023 and beyond.
As we end 2022 and step into the New Year, I offer my best wishes, added to those of my Aubrey colleagues, to our clients, prospects and social media followers. Thank you for your continued support. To the ‘crew’ at Aubrey – thank you for your talent, efforts and determination in 2022. 2023 is a year of great potential, so enjoy the break with your families and friends and remerge at full speed in January!
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