26 MAY, 2006
BY CHARLIE PARKER
Richard Horlick and Lord Jacob Rothschild’s new boutique Spencer House Capital Management is incubating three new long-only equity funds for former Citywire rated F&C managers Christian Dangerfield and Kerry Goh.
Dangerfield, who was briefly A-rated in 2003, and Goh, who achieved a AAA in the same year, are to return to fund management at Spencer House with an Asian fund and a Japanese fund respectively. Former Morgan Stanley manager Ben Legge will be given a European fund.
For the moment Spencer House operates under the regulatory status of First Arrow Investment Management, another Rothschild business, which focuses on hedge funds.
Horlick, who was head of investments at Schroders until last year, will not run money but will take the role of chief executive at the business. Lord Rothschild will be chairman.
Dangerfield and Goh have been known to be actively seeking new roles since leaving F&C in 2004. Their careers have been linked since both ran funds for Govett where Dangerfield was chief investment officer.
Dangerfield joined F&C in February 2004 as head of pacific equities and manager of F&C Pacific investment trust (WPC)and poached Goh to head the Japanese equities team. The pair left in November that year at the time of the Isis/F&C merger.
His departure was believed to be a key reason for F&C losing the mandate to run the Pacific trust, which was later renamed Witan Pacific.
Dangerfield joined Govett in 1992 and was based in Singapore for a number of years. Since then he has sought to apply an investment process that looks for short-term valuation anomalies in stocks that have the potential for long-term growth.
Legge has not run retail money since 2004 when he had a five month stint as manager of the Morgan Stanley European ex UK (Morgan Stanley European (Ex UK) Equity A Acc)and the Morgan Stanley No Load European Equity funds.
The new boutique is the latest in a string of successful businesses to be backed by Rothschild since he resigned from NM Rothschild after a family dispute in 1980. These include RIT Capital Partners and St James’s Place Capital.