J O Hambro Capital Management (JOHCM) has appointed Vishal Bhatia, Tom Matthews and Mark Costar to replace Alex Savvides at the helm of its £1.3bn UK Dynamic fund.
FE fundinfo Alpha Manager Savvides will join Jupiter later this year to run the £2.1bn Jupiter UK Special Situations fund, where he will take over from Ben Whitmore, who is leaving to start his own venture.
Charles Stanley chief investment analyst Rob Morgan described poaching Savvides as a “coup” for Jupiter. “He comes with plenty of experience in the UK market, a similar value style and a decent stock-picking record,” Morgan said.
JOHCM, meanwhile, is forming a new team to run both its UK Growth and UK Dynamic investment strategies with joint assets of £1.7bn.
Vishal Bhatia and Mark Costar, senior fund managers of the £168m UK Growth fund, have worked alongside Savvides since the UK Dynamic fund’s inception in 2008 so they are no strangers to the investment process they are taking over.
Andrew Parry, JOHCM’s head of investments, said: “Bhatia and Costar were heavily involved in the formative years of the product and have retained a strong, close working relationship with the strategy ever since.”
Tom Matthews, co-head of sustainable investments since December 2021, will move into the new team. He was previously an analyst on the UK Dynamic strategy for eight years.
JOHCM’s broader UK equity platform also includes the JOHCM UK Equity Income strategy run by Clive Beagles and James Lowen, and the UK Opportunities strategy, led by Rachel Reutter and Michael Ulrich, as well as a team of analysts.
Savvides’ UK Dynamic fund and the smaller UK Growth strategy have both outperformed the FTSE All Share and peers in the IA UK All Companies Sector over the past decade, as the chart below shows.
Performance of funds vs benchmark over 10yrs
Source: FE Analytics
Darius McDermott, manager of Chelsea Financial Services, has sold out of the UK Dynamic fund due to Savvides' departure. He anticipated that JOHCM would draw from its existing UK manager capability to appoint colleagues to take over the fund, but said "with the UK Dynamic fund, it really was Alex. We met him before he launched the fund and have been with it pretty much since then. Hence regrettably, we have sold our position."