Odey sets up private client weath fund
LEADING City fund manager, Crispin Odey, has launched a new wealth management business aimed at private clients.
Odey Wealth Management will charge clients a flat fee of one per cent and it has hired Tim Bond, a former managing director of Barclays Capital and Peter Martin a former managing director of Rothschilds.
Odey, the investment manager behind Odey Asset Management who has recently been shortlisted for CityA.M.’s inaugural annual awards, said he believed many investors were getting a raw deal from the current crop of “bloated” wealth managers.
The fund manager blamed his contemporaries for seeking consensus economic views, which often led their funds to underperform. He also attacked fund of funds as an investment vehicle alongside fund platforms.
“Too many so-called professional investors embrace mediocrity by seeking consensus views that starve private clients of performance whilst lining the managers’ pockets with high and often hidden charges,” he said.
“In addition, the fund of funds approach to wealth management has been outed as expensive, opaque and sub-optimal. The platform model is similarly doomed. Private clients want to buy a fund manager’s judgement not an endless choice of ways to lose money.”
Odey said his new proposition would attract private clients looking to invest over the long term. He said now was the right time to launch such a proposition because he did not subscribe to the consensus view that there was a high risk of a double dip global recession.
He said: “Where we are today equities are quite cheap against cash.”