Star US manager Cormac Weldon has said his move to Artemis from Threadneedle will allow him the freedom to spend more time concentrating on investment.
Speaking exclusively to Investment Adviser, Mr Weldon, who along with colleague Stephen Moore and five other colleagues, left Threadneedle to join Artemis earlier this year, said he welcomed the move to a smaller firm.
He said: “It is inevitable in bigger organisations, a natural law that you have to do some things that you do not want to do.
“But here at Artemis I will definitely have more time to be investing.”
Mr Weldon claimed his move was down to the fact that he’d had a successful period at Threadneedle and thought it was “probably good to have a fresh challenge and a fresh perspective”.
And he chose Artemis because it is a “fund management business run by fund managers” and that managers at the firm are “supported and trusted rather than micro-managed in what you do”.
He admitted he had been approached before but said Artemis was “clearly an opportunity that I did not want to miss”.
Apart from the extra time freed up to spend on investing, Mr Weldon said that it would be “business as usual” for him and his team at Artemis.
Artemis is preparing to launch five new funds for its new US team in September, mirroring almost exactly the range the team ran at Threadneedle.
Mr Weldon will run the Artemis US fund, the Artemis US Select fund and the Artemis US Smaller Companies fund, with Mr Moore as his deputy on all three strategies.
The new funds are set to be launched at a time when many commentators are claiming the US stock market is expensive..
But Mr Weldon said the higher valuations in the US, relative to the rest of the world, were justified given the economic and earnings growth set to come through..
Mr Moore and William Warren will co-manage the Artemis US Extended Alpha fund and the Artemis US Absolute Return fund.
Mr Weldon said that the fund launches will likely happen at around the same time and said he had a “fair degree of confidence there is sufficient client demand for each strategy”.
Although the team is likely to be running much less money than it was at Threadneedle, where the Threadneedle American and American Select funds both had more than £2bn, Mr Weldon said he would not change the way he runs the funds.
He said that while there were stocks he could not invest in for liquidity reasons at Threadneedle that he might consider at Artemis, he had no “plan to skew the funds down in market cap”.
